# of Words: 623

Should you pay attention to the covers of a number of publications, you know you can (a) get some super-toned arms, (b) start your meditation practice, or (c) transform your home into a clutter-free minimalist paradise. In other words, for the average person, three weeks is sufficient time to either achieve something small or start something bigger.

Evidence #1 that Anthony Burgess is anything but an average human: he wrote his most famous novel in only three weeks.

Evidence #2 that Anthony Burgess is anything but an average individual? The novel he wrote (in only 3 weeks, mind you) is A Clockwork Orange.

This profoundly unsettling masterpiece burst on the scene in 1962, shocking readers because of both its intense violence and its intense brilliance. Before A Clockwork Orange came out, Burgess had been best known for his work as a linguist and because of a "sweetly satiric" trilogy of novels about the end of British Colonialism on the Malay Peninsula.

Yeah. This was the last time anyone would accuse Anthony Burgess of being "sweetly satiric."

Because A Clockwork Orange follows the exploits of Alex, perhaps the very amoral protagonist in literature. This man beats up people for pleasure, steals for fun, drinks drug-laced milk for pleasure, and rapes and murders for pleasure. He's a living nightmare: a bloodthirsty, cruel and demonic child who's finally placed behind bars when his buddies turn on him.

But this is only the halfway point of Alex's twisted saga. He gets put in an experimental treatment program called "the Ludovico technique," where he's brainwashed into feeling profound nausea whenever he's subjected to anything violent. This has the effect of turning a previously dangerous offender into a risk-averse shadow of his former self--in actuality, he's so physically revolted by the idea of violence that he'd rather suffer himself than put anyone in harm's way.

In other words: he has lost his free will.

And believe it or not, the fact that Anthony Burgess produced a philosophical parable about modern ethics is only one of the two chief reasons A Clockwork Orange is indeed crazy-brilliant. The other reason is that Burgess created a new dialect: Alex and his friends speak "nadsat" a Russian-influenced slang that is so pervasive (and, frankly, therefore hard to understand) that many copies of A Clockwork Orange include a glossary.

Of course, we can't talk about the heritage of A Clockwork Orange without mentioning the thing that imprinted that name into the collective consciousness: Stanley Kurbick's 1971 film version. Maybe you've even sat down and seen the whole thing. In this book, it's a brilliant movie, and one worthy of Burgess' novel.

But Burgess had other thoughts. In fact, he hated the film so much that he desired he's never written the book in the first place:

We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I'm best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate [...] it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I must not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

Lucky for us, though, you can't unring a bell...and you can't unwrite a book, especially not one as notoriously genius as A Clockwork Orange. Even in the event that you forget Kubrick's movie version (that's, um, hard to do) A Clockwork Orange still has a location on Modern Library's 100 Best Novels record and Time's "Best English-Language Novels Published Since 1923.

And it's safe to say that Burgess gets the gold medal for "Best Achievement Completed In Three Weeks."

Related Papers

The Godfather Mario Puzo

Don Vito Corleone is the head of an American-Italian Mafia family. His household is just 1 of the 5 families in NY. These households are the most powerful crime organisations of the USA. Of those 5 has the Corleone family the greatest power. However, of course, in NY, there is a good deal of competition between the families. It has been 10 years since the lasst war. Ever since then, het power of Don Corleone was created. Everything remained quiet and calm until a man named Sollozzo came along.......Read More

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers makes us feel just like slackers. She also wrote and published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at 1940, when she was twenty-three years old. Yeah. The novel was a breakout hit and jump-started McCullers' exceptionally successful literary career. During the upcoming twenty-ish decades, she wrote novels, short stories, plays, reviews, articles, poems, as well as Hollywood scripts. In case you were not impressed enough already, she did all of this while combating......Read More

For Whom The Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a classic warfare romance (that is a war play and a love, in one). Set in the hills of Spain in 1937, it tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the Republicans (that is one facet of the Spanish Civil War, not the American political party) who is ordered to blow up a bridge as part of a bigger offensive. A good deal of sweat, blood, and tears went into this book, and we mean actually. It is really wrapped in, and......Read More

Related Topics