Novel
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962
Synopsis
An English town, in the near future. A fifteen-year-old boy and his three companions drink milk laced with drugs, then go out: they beat an old man on his way home from the library, fight a rival gang, steal a car and break into an isolated house where a writer is working on a book. Back at his parents' home, the boy listens to a violin concerto, then to Mozart and Bach, and falls asleep. The next day he skips school, and his probation officer comes to see him.
Context
Its author claimed to have written it in three weeks; according to the foundation that keeps his archives, he worked on it for more than a year and finished it in August 1961. The invented language spoken by the narrator takes its name from the Russian suffix that corresponds to our ending for the numbers from thirteen to nineteen, and its author wanted it to turn the book into a manual of brainwashing: the reader was to come away with a minimal Russian vocabulary, effortlessly and to his own surprise. The twenty-one chapters, three parts of seven, refer to the age of majority. At the foot of the twentieth chapter the manuscript bears a handwritten note considering ending the book there: the English publisher kept the last chapter, the American one cut it, and it appeared in the United States in full only in 1986.
Who it is for
A short novel, written in an invented slang mixing English and Russian. Some editions include a glossary, but the meaning is established in the reading.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some thirty languages, it was adapted for the cinema in 1971 in the film A Clockwork Orange.
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