Das Uhrwerk-Testament

Enderby #3

by Anthony Burgess, Walter Brumm (Translator)

Nach „CLOCKWORK ORANGE" (UHRWERK ORANGE) nun ein neuer intellektuell-zeitkritischer Roman von Anthony Burgess
Clockwork - das Uhrwerk menschlichen Daseins, aufgezogen und abgelaufen in der Schilderung der merkwürdigen Existenz des Professors Enderby, welcher an einer New Yorker Universität Literatur-Vorlesungen hält. Außerdem ist er intellektueller Schankwirt einer Bar in Tanger - aus purem Zufall (- der eigentlich als Mordfall
geplant war)...
Enderby, skurriler Repräsentant beider Zünfte, ist Realist und Idealist zugleich.
Seine Auffassung von der Freiheit des Menschen zur Entscheidung für oder wider das Böse spricht in ihrer überspitzt intellektuellen Auslegung und ihrer - wahlweise derben Explikation bürgerlich frömmelnden Konventionen Hohn. Er hat Feinde.
Und er genießt sie, ohne ihnen je aus dem Wege zu gehen. Lebendiger Geist in einem zunehmend verfallenden Körper - fettsüchtig, kurzsichtig, zahnlos und mit Angina Pectoris behaftet - hält er das Leben fest, das sich ihm mit jeder neuen Herzattacke mehr entzieht Dies wohl wissend, nutzt er die Freiheit des „So-und-nicht-anders-Sein" bis zum letzten Augenblick, sein Beispiel denen als Testament hinterlassend, die erkennen, wie es gemeint ist.
Sprachliche Eigenwilligkeit, geistreicher Aphorismus, geschliffene Ironie und bis an die Grenze des Obszönen gehende Deftigkeit zeichnen diesen ungewöhnlichen Roman aus, der in seiner funosen Gewagtheit und seiner berstenden Wortgewalt ohne Vorbild ist - und wohl auch ohne Nachfolger bleiben wird.
Eine brillante und bitterböse Satire auf die Trends der Gegenwart im Stil seiner Romane „Clockwork Orange" (Uhrwerk Orange, Heyne-Buch Nr. 928) und „1985" (Heyne Buch Nr. 5981), seiner Alternative zu „1984' und Auseinandersetzung mit George Orwell.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels

143 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).

He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Outrageous.

Enderby in New York City - shitcan political correctness, hilarity without end. Anthony Burgess, you've really done it this time. The Clockwork Testament is satire tooled razor sharp and laced with the Enderby poetic, an uproarious literary counterpoint to cartoons by R. Crumb.

I plan to expand this brief review but meanwhile I'd like to encourage readers to either read this zany Burgess blaster or listen to the exceptional audio book narrated by John Sessions.

My favorite three scenes: Enderby teaching his British lit class, Enderby teaching his creative writing class, Enderby on a TV evening talk show. Oh, how I enjoyed this novel that, again, can be read as the literary counterpart to R. Crumb cartoons, as per the below -


Enderby's vision of the typical American watching television


Enderby's vision of the typical young American female


Enderby's vision of the typical American college student


Enderby's vision of a typical older American educator, a kind of bureaucratic version of Mr. Natural, who wants to make education relevant

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

What if your increasingly xenophobic and un-PC uncle (they used to be so sweet!) also happened to have the vocabulary of Joyce, the cadences of Hopkins, the sense of humour of Rabelais and the capacity for imaginative conceit of Donne? What if this playful uncle, one of your favourite relatives by far, turns up one thanksgiving and starts ranting about not only the usual Fox News Fare (immigrants and licentious liberals—and, of course, BLM—are the root, branch, and leaf on the tree of modern evil) but also some obscure, perhaps also obscurantist, genius-level-drivel about the Pelagian heresy, possibly as cover for the aforementioned, but also perhaps because it part of a real existential crisis for him?

Answer: then your uncle would be either (depending upon whether or not you think that novels are just concealed autobiography) Anthony Burgess' main character in this novel, FX Enderby (age 56 by this third installment [circa 1973*], and still as "filthy, fat,[and] hairy" as ever), or Anthony Burgess himself (same).

[*According to my edition, a Schenectedy, NY, ex-lib 1st Edition—with precisely zero previous readers, too, the library card sez]

Another way of looking at it: in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera barges into his own novel to claim that his characters represent certain tendencies in himself that he has more or less checked, or left unindulged. The characters have crossed some kind of imaginary "border" (into Being—well, at least into a kind of being), while the author has remained on the other side.

The pertinent question, of course, concerns just how uncomfortably close to that righteous southern Border Wall this particular author is getting here, and on the surface, at least, today's social-media-educated and reality-informed reader feels that he's gotten so close to it as to be caught getting lost in Juarez in the rain, and at Easter time, too.

But Burgess is one sly bugger who likes to say "bugger" a lot, and it would be unwise to underestimate him. That said, since modern life (again to paraphrase Kundera once more) is to live under a continual spotlight in some glass house which is also a televisual courtroom in which we thespians are to be put through an unceasing, extra-judicial undue process, consider this ever-so-slightly bowdlerized Exhibit A, in which Temporary Professor Enderby offers a suitably angry African-American creative writing student a lesson in prosody in lieu of grappling with said student's suitably angry poem (it is 1973, remember, so…just like 2020 in some ways, in other words—and oh: please do not click the spoiler link and blame your humble reviewer—blame the times, such as they are [no longer, with Stoppard, "indifferent" at least], blame whatever it is your uncle is blaming [it's catching!], blame it on the rain [which won't arrive till it's too late]…):
Note: The first line of the poem is: "It will be your balls, next, whitey." Do click on the next spoiler at your own risk.

'The point [of the poem] is the hate, [the student said].’[…]
'Poetry is made out of emotions,’ [he] pronounced.

‘Oh no,’ Enderby said. ‘Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words.’

‘It’s the hate,’ Lloyd Utterage said. ‘It’s the expression of the black experience.’

‘Now,’ Enderby said, ‘we will try a little experiment. I take it that this term whitey is racialist and full of opprobrium and so on. Suppose now we substitute for it the word er [redacted disyllable] –’

There was a general gasp of disbelief.

‘I mean, if, as you said, the point is the hate, then the hate can best be expressed – and, indeed, in poetry must be expressed – as an emotion available to the generality of mankind. So instead of either whitey or [redacted] you could have, er, [redacted] or, say, [redacted monosyllable] . But [redacted monosyllable] probably wouldn’t do …’

‘You’re telling me it wouldn’t do,’ Chuck Szymanowski said.

‘Since the end-words are disyllabic or, er, yes trisyllabic but never monosyllabic. A matter of structure,’ Enderby said. ‘So listen. It will be your balls next, [disyllable], etc etc. It will be your prick next, [disyllable] , and so on. Now it is the structure that interests me. It’s not, of course, a very subtle or interesting structure, as er Lloyd here would be the first to admit, but it is the structure that has the vitality, not all this nonsense about hate and so on. I mean, imagine a period when this kind of race hate stupidity is all over, and yet the poem – aere perennius, you know – still by some accident survives. Well, it would be taken as a somewhat primitive but still quite engaging essay in vilification in terms of an anatomical catalogue, the structure objectifying and, as it were, cooling the hate. Comic too on the personal level, ‘It will be your balls next, er Crassus or say Lycidas. Rather Catullan. You see.’ He smiled at them. Now they were really learning something.
[…]
‘Maaaaaan,’ drawled Lloyd Utterage, leaning back in simulated ease, smiling crocodilewise. ‘You play you little games with youself. All this shit about words. Closing your eyes to what’s going on in the big big world.’

And so on and so forth.

There are so, SO many allusions to Hopkins and Joyce in this short-but-dense little book that those familiar with the works of those authors will get more out of Burgess' cross-border shenanigans here than will other readers, but the (1) filming of Hopkins's "Wreck of the Deutschland" (turning it into a sub-sub-Tarantino-esque orgy of Nazified violence, as is Hollywood's wont, I suppose); (2) subsequent excursion by our hero onto daytime talk-show TV to "defend" the film (from accusations of inspiring real life violence, a la A.B.'s own experiences with A Clockwork Orange, one supposes), a film that he is mentioned in the credits for but has had nothing otherwise to do with, really; and (3) the made-for-tv version of Augustine's debate with Pelagius over the doctrine of (a proleptic cover version of the INXS song, I have reason to believe) Original Sin—are all kinda nerdily hilarious and/or uncalled for in this day and age, surely.

3.5* rounded down, for making this reviewer squirm more often than is healthy for him in this day and (at his) age, surely.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burgess responds to the furore around Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in the form of a truculent and wildly un-PC comic novel. Here, an Enderby poem forms the source material for a movie that causes the violent rape of a nun (as happened with unfortunate real-life droogs), and the dyspeptic poet appears on TV to defend his original. Sadly, Burgess’s flatulent steamrollering satire trivialises any point he wishes to make, as the comedy launches right-hooks at feminists, creative writing students (in a squeamish chapter one hopes is not autobiographical), talk show hosts, directors, uneducated “blacks”, and any other philistine who fails to worship The Word. Enderby, here openly racist, homophobic, sexist, and repulsive, fortunately croaks in little under 100 pages. The three stars refer to sentences like: “Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse.”

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Clockwork Testament is a wonderful, densely packed (albeit very short) novel, chronicling one day in the life of Francis Enderby, a middle-aged, minor English poet (yet to be anthologized), adrift in the late twentieth century and who wishes he'd been born at least 100 years earlier.

The Clockwork Testament is, despite its title, only partially a response by the author to the popularity/notoriety of Stanley Kubrick's filmed adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. It is primarily a humorous character study of Enderby: dyspeptic, flatulent, racist, misogynistic, enamored with the past and disgusted with the present, a man with absolutely no filter (and, I would venture, someone who in this era would be diagnosed with Asberger Syndrome)--in other words, an obnoxious, yet also (oddly enough) in some ways a morally scrupulous, individual.

Broken into eleven chapters, the book is mostly built around conversations Enderby has with various opponents (I can think of no more appropriate word than that). One of my favorites is the interview of Enderby conducted by one of his students for a magazine called Women for Jesus. (Enderby's response to the title: "Why just women for Jesus? I thought anyone could join.")

The funniest exchange, however, takes place in Enderby's first class of the day, in which he is supposed to give a lecture on minor Elizabethan dramatists. On his way to the class he realizes he's completely forgotten which writers he'd planned to talk about. So he makes one up on the spot: Gervase Whitelady, 1559-1591. This entire scene is literary comedy at its best.

Enderby's appearance on a late-night talk show is when Burgess's response to the Clockwork Orange hullabaloo really kicks in. At the beginning of the novel (in flashback, really), Enderby had suggested to a Hollywood producer that he adapt Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. The resultant movie had little to do with the actual poem, and includes a scene in which nuns are raped by Nazis. Enderby is attacked by the other guests on the show for his involvement in the movie (which, though they don't realize it, is practically nil), and he does his best to defend the film--out of loyalty to the long-dead Hopkins more than anything else.

Most of this chapter is presented as a transcript of the show, which contains weird conflations and misspellings on the clueless transcriber's part as a way of showing just how vapid and inappropriate the late-night talk show medium is for debating such issues as religion, free will, sin, and the concept of good and evil.

Truly one of the more entertaining and enlightening novels I've read in a while, and one I'll definitely read again. (After all, it only took me a day to read it this first time around.)

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enderby is hilariously politically incorrect: teaching a creative writing class he is scathingly disdainful of his students' attempts and does not give a flying whatever about them or any of the world's intellectual pygmies that surround him, even finding himself inventing a minor poet called Gerald Whitelady. He is however a champion of free speech insofar as it relates to his adaptation of a poem, which in the hands of a director morphs into a movie about Nazis raping nuns. This is an all-too-obvious relation to real life when Burgess was pilloried for the violence inspired by the movie adaptation of his most famous novel by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess apparently described as "Clockwork Marmalade". Enderby is a gloriously dyspeptic creation.

[Chris Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

F X Enderby is my spirit animal!!!!

[Glass River]

Famously, Burgess wrote spoof reviews of novels by his pseudonymised hack alter ego, ‘Joseph Kell’. ‘Be warned’, he solicitously warned (unwitting) readers of the first volume of Kell’s Enderby saga, this is ‘in many ways a dirty book’. This, the last in the Enderby sequence, is, be warned, reader, dirtier by far. A Clockwork Orange is the best-known of Burgess’ novels – for the perverse reason, as the author persisted in believing, that an American film-maker adapted his novel and got it all wrong. ‘Clockwork Marmalade’ was what Burgess called Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The 1962 novel is a quasi-theological meditation on the youth of the day – their ‘teddy boy’ dandyism, their ‘cosh boy’ violence, their inherent good and evil. The narrative is given in a sub-Joycean patois (Nadsat) not easily understood. Stanley Kubrick bought the rights to A Clockwork Orange (for a pittance, as Burgess complained) and made it entirely understandable. In both versions it is framed around the virtuoso juvenile delinquent Alex DeLarge (evoking that other juvenile hero, Alexander the Great). The film features orgiastic Technicolor violence. Burgess resented the gratuitous savagery, but even more the fact that Kubrick came from a different religious tradition. A cradle Catholic, Burgess believed, as did St Augustine, that goodness can only be achieved by a progress through sin. You cannot be programmed into virtue: it is as unnatural as the titular orange. Judaism takes a less stark moral line.
Theological dispute was one problematic element in the background of the Clockwork Orange adaptation. A second was the copycat crime committed, allegedly, by youthful British fans of the movie. Kubrick (resident at this stage of his life in the UK) withdrew his film from circulation in Britain. A third element was the year Burgess spent as a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York in 1972. While he was there he contrived to get up everyone’s nose.
Burgess was, in 1972, aged fifty-five (Enderby’s age), getting very cranky and feeling his years (the book could as well be called The Clockwork Last Will and Testament, though in fact he lasted until 1993). The narrative opens with the poet Enderby waking in his squalid New York apartment. He feels bad, and has lots to feel bad about. He is lying ‘naked also on a fast-drying nocturnal ejaculation’. The wet dream was inspired by having seen some twelve-year-old Puerto Rican girls playing in the street, their dresses flying up. Enderby, in earlier life, wrote a narrative poem about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, a poem, by a Catholic priest, about five German nuns fleeing persecution, who were drowned in the English Channel in 1875. Why, the tormented Jesuit poet asks himself, did God do it?
Rights to Enderby’s poem about Hopkins’ poem have been picked up for a pittance ($750) by a ‘famed’ Jewish film director, Melvin Schaumwein (‘Wine-scum’), who has shot it as a nun-slasher movie with ‘over-explicit scenes of the nuns being violated by teenage storm-troopers’. Enderby is unconsentingly ‘credited’ and is now reviled in the tabloids and on TV. He can handle it. He rather likes being reviled. Worse, however, is that in a bar-room conversation he discovers that his fellow drinker is the grandson of the boy commemorated in Hopkins’ tender poem ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’. He now learns that Hopkins (‘he was a fag’) took the opportunity to bugger the boy. Could even St Augustine (about whom Enderby is writing another long poem) handle that? He has three heart attacks during the course of the day and dies during an extremely unwise sexual bout with an admirer of his poems. His last words are: ‘Oh, this is all too American’.

[Alex Sarll]

Through the first two Enderby books, one wonders how autobiographical the shambolic poet protagonist might be. Once philistines start traducing him for youth violence which bears some similarities to a film loosely based on his work...well, that rather clarifies the matter. Barely a novel, but interesting nonetheless.

[Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Plot-less, pretentious, try-too-hard garbage masquerading as "satire." I love A Clockwork Orange, and I'm sorry Burgess took so much shit for it, but writing this book is a ridiculous reaction on his part.

[Totarota · Rating 2 out of 5]

Diese Novelle knüpft in verschiedener Hinsicht an Clockwork Orange an. Es geht auch hier immer mal wieder um die Frage eines freien Willens des Menschen zum Guten oder zum Bösen. Außerdem greift Burgess die Vorwürfe der Gewaltverherrlichung in seinem Erfolgsroman (und Kubricks Film) auf, indem er seinen Protagonisten mit ähnlichen Beschuldigungen konfrontiert. Dieser, ein Literaturprofessor und Dichter, hat nämlich wage zum Drehbuch eines skandalösen Kinofilms beigetragen. Auch wenn es sich klar um Satire handelt, die - zumindest im Jahr 1973 - provozieren soll, und der rassistische und wenig sympathische Professor allerlei skurrile Situationen produziert, fand ich das Buch leider nicht sonderlich interessant.

[Mauro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uma fantasia do Burguess sobre a reação pública ao filme do Kubrick, baseado no livro dele. A melhor parte é perceber como as universidades, inclusive americanas, já passavam por uma fase de adolescentimento permissivo há cinquenta anos. Não era mais um mundo para o Enderby.

[Derek Bridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enderby on the way out, shouting and brandishing his stick. Could be very funny, and has some very serious intent too (original sin, incitement, censorship), but hard to stomach some of it, even if presented as the opinions of a throwback.

[Thomas Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite funny, equally as tragic. Probably partially autobiographical in a way

[Gaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short, sharp, and as utterly Burgessian as you might imagine.

[Rafael · Rating 1 out of 5]

na tontadas guarrindongas

[Vel Veeter]

This was supposed to be the end of the character Enderby, and does take place on his last day. Knowing that, you spend a long time in the novel trying to figure out how and why he is going to die. As an out of shape drinker and smoker who has spent his whole life eating English food, you can guess of course, but there’s some slipperiness here. Enderby has recently been commissioned to help turn a well-known long poem into a film script. The movie came out and among other things included scenes of rape, the debauchery of Nazis, sexuality and nuns, and other things. If this and the title of the novel makes you think about Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange, well, yeah, that’s the idea. Anthony Burgess famously hated Kubrick’s version. Part of the reason is that the original American publication of A Clockwork Orange cut out the final chapter of Burgess’s book. In that version, Alex goes through the treatment and when he tries to die by suicide in the penultimate chapter, he seems to have reversed the treatment. That’s where the American edition and the film ends, but in the original, the final chapter has Alex basically growing out of his violence. It’s not to suggest that that is what always happens to young people, but it puts the choice to reform back into the realm of free choice, or not, and not compulsory to the criminal reform system. Burgess also thought the movie glorified the violence, which it does to a certain degree, by putting so much in the narrative perspective of Alex, which is true, but it also makes the audience quite a bit more complicit in it. It also has the issue of softening certain elements of the violence in just enough to make it more palatable, which has the opposite effect of being horrifying.

Anyway, Enderby also doesn’t understand how it ended up this way. He also doesn’t like the idea that a) he’s being held accountable for someone’s else’s choices and b) how reactionary the criticism is. It’s a reminder that “cancel culture” is not new remotely in terms of reactionary criticism that aims at censorship, as opposed to critique.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella is the third of Burgess's Enderby books, although it stands alone well (it's been a long time since I read the first two). It's amazing how many words Burgess can't fit into 160 pages; as usual, the chief attraction here is Burgess's linguistic fireworks. Not many writers are so clever, or exhibit their cleverness so persistently. Burgess is up there with Nabokov in this sense.

There are two additional attractions to this book that distinguish it from Burgess's other books. First, Burgess deals directly with the most famous, and most uncharacteristic, episode of his career - the notoriety brought on by Kubrick's adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. Burgess's connection to the movie was something of mixed blessing, of course, as he felt the adaptation was more or less irrelevant to the book. And the Clockwork book doesn't really speak much to the rest of Burgess's work. So it's interesting and hilarious when Enderby has to deal with a pornographic adaptation of one of his (very minor) works. Second, this book takes Enderby, an inescapably bean-eating English poet, to early seventies New York, where he must contend with radical students. There are some tone-deaf racist jokes, but really, Burgess isn't just interested in this stuff as a matter of (facile and dated) humor. The issue of race, and how something so seemingly extraneous to personhood can be so terribly imprisoning, is dealt with pretty seriously here.

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

In ‘A Clockwork Testament’ Mr Enderby – now teaching literature to radical students in an early 1970s New York university – has ceased to be the Mr Enderby of the first book and has basically become a vessel for Burgess’s satirical commentary on the literary life and the crassness of American culture. And yet his character continues to live, because he is such a great creation and because the radical change in his life clearly reflects what Burgess felt about his own unexpected fame. And the fart and burp jokes still work.

Burgess's jaundiced view brings his prejudices to the fore, and yet the book is certainly witty and funny, oddly moving in unexpected ways, and exceptionally cleverly constructed given its short length. The transcript of Enderby’s television interview alone is a small masterpiece of comic writing, and the end is a perfect end to the sequence (except that it wasn't).

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to reread the Enderby novels when I recently read a biography of Burgess and the author referred to them as veiled, wildly exaggerated autobiography. I'd never thought of the books that way, since Enderby is such a klutz. But I thought I'd go back and have a look.

In this third Enderby novel, Burgess seems to have relaxed with the verbal excesses, and is making allusion to his own troubles with the film of A Clockwork Orange. This is more accessable and likable than the two previous books.

[Vanyo666 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesome finale to the original trilogy. One has to wonder if part four happens in heaven, hell or purgatory (or maybe in limbo?). In my opinion this is the funniest Enderby so far (and I mean a laugh out loud book), and I also liked the fact that this time around we don't get to pity Enderby very much. Rather, throughout the book he is standing up for his beliefs and acting in consequence, and going out with a bang.. Getting straight into part four, lucky me I didn't have to wait 12 years like the contemporary readers.

[Shervin Ghiami · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.1

A poignant, semi-autobiographical account of the last day of Enderby's life. The title is a testament to the profound success of A Clockwork Orange, which led to countless misinterpretations by the general public, and was deemed excessively crass. Enderby's time as a professor is remniscent of Burgess' own teachings, and the format of the book is sprinkled with homages to Ulysses. It feels like a very personal account of elderly existence, but obviously riddled with classic Burgessian wit. A shame it is so short, there are some great moments in here.

[John Vogel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thinly veiled reaction to the popularity of the movie A Clockwork Orange. Burgess states his own thoughts on the backlash from the movie through Professor Enderby, a British poet living and teaching in Manhattan during the 70's. The character is likable but gets himself into situations where he blurts out offensive phrases without thinking, soliciting harsh reactions from students and studio audiences. This is the final book of the Enderby Trilogy.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did enjoy the book. I read this years ago, and decided to give it another look. Love the story line!!! Most plots dealing with any ethical standpoint I enjoy. I always wonder how far are we from this. I found this to be a quick read. with our present technology, it is easy to over look the language Burgess applied.
I know most people read this in high school. Take another look at it.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is very little in terms of plot in this short novel, which serves more as a vehicle for Burgess to reflect on a number of issues. The character of Enderby is much more to the fore, serving perhaps as a mouthpiece for Burgess' views. Although it sounds dated at times, the humour is always good, with lots of interesting stylistic passages a bonus, too.

[Angela Mcentee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Burgess is a fascinating writer and person. He uses words I have to look up, yet I don't resent him for it. He loves words. I loved clockwork orange but this May be my favorite book by him. Love the scenes where Enderby is teaching the American college students... ..

[Will]

Heard this was good. I tried a Burgess novel a few years ago and didn't like it--I think it was over my head--but I'm willing to give him another shot.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good. Funny. Sure. Very incisive satire on American hyper-popular and -defensive culture.

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enderby touches down on Mr. Sammler's planet to pay for Kubrick's blood orange and ponder Burgess's clockwork conundrum.

[Leif Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of my Burgess obsession when I was in high school.