“A Clockwork Orange”, by Anthony Burgess

After reading 1984 nearly a year ago, I spent good hours sifting through the Google search results for “dystopia novels”. I think that’s how I got to this one, but I couldn’t be sure. Books often spend months at a time on my to-read list, and (un?)luckily I don’t keep track of who recommended what.

With its weird Russian-influenced Nadsat English, A Clockwork Orange became interesting pretty quickly. Here’s a sample paragraph:

“They viddied us just as we viddied them, and there was like a very quit kind of watching each other now. This would be real, this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the britva, not just fisties and boots. Billyboy and his droogs stopped what they were doing, which was just getting ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on.”

As you can see, even my not-enough-to-speak knowledge of Russian helped make this a lot of fun. It took me nearly half the audio book to figure out that “horrorshow” meant “хорошо” and not “horror show”. (That pun is actually used in the book, too.)

In the end, it turned out to be more of a coming-of-age story than an earnest dystopia. (Perhaps that’s why the ending caught me off-guard.) But if you asked me what other book I could compare it with, I wouldn’t have an answer, and this is enough to make it a great read.

• Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
• What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
• It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

Quotes from “The Moon and Sixpence”

by William Somerset Maugham.

• Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
• Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
• I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
• Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.
• There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love […]
• What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe.
• The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.
• A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her, […] but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
• Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
• […] the chains she forged only aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass window makes your fingers itch for half a brick […]
• As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
• Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.

Notă: am citit cartea în Română şi am fost surprins să găsesc câteva cuvinte ale căror sens îl ştiam din Engleză (ar trebui să fie invers): deconcertat, sordid, vendetă, sardonic, a disua. O altă curiozitate este faptul că numele personajului Tough Bill a fost tradus ca Bill Ghioagă :roll: