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A Clockwork Orange / Honey for the Bears
Collected edition of two of Burgess' best known novels.
- GenresFiction
436 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1968
7 people are currently reading
144 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Burgess
360 books4,296 followersLibrarian 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 .
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 .
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 30, 2025
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
You must read this and you can forget about the rest of the text here.
This is one of the best works that I have ever read. It is one of my absolute favorites and it did not fail to awe me after a third reading.
The language is extraordinary, even if it has crossed my mind that, if I were to hear the same language in a Romanian play I would be outraged. It is a strange situation where the language of the Clockwork Orange makes it such a masterpiece, but then hearing the (translated) language on my street I would have a seizure.
The subject, the heroes are repelling, the words- as much as I understand them- are terrifying.
Alex, the main character keeps saying “horror show”, but this is in the manner of Donnie Brasco, who explained that mobsters use
“Forget about it” all the time, for anything: from forget about it, to excellent, we did, he was good, or she was bad…sometimes the meaning hanging on the tone of voice only.
Horror show seems to mean perfect and reflect the sick obsession with “ultra- violence”- another word from the slang sensational vocabulary used in this fantastic book.
The main theme seems to be the “ultra-violence” and it is portrayed in the most fabulous language ever used by a “brother”…real or fictional. Here are some of these words:
Baboochka, bezoomy, brat, britva, chelloveck, devotchka, droog, grahzny, forella, litso, malchick, millicents and many more.
Perhaps you should study the words before you read A Clockwork Orange. Even if I missed the meaning of a phrase here and there, because of these Anglo- Russian terms, I loved this book.
We come to hate Alex for he is doing: torturing women and homeless people, fighting his own mates. But the punishment raises other issues. I will avoid details, so that you enjoy reading A Clockwork Orange. Much of the pleasure in reading this masterpiece comes from the excellent depiction and not so much from “the action”.
However, what happens raises quite a few questions- how much do you punish a criminal? Are prisons overcrowded? And when they are, do they serve the purpose of rehabilitation or they just torture inmates.
There are some documentaries, some of them on BBC Knowledge can be watched these days, that present the situation in jails that look like and are Hell on Earth.
Yes, criminals must pay for their crimes, but is it just to torture them?
One image from the film A Clockwork Orange is very famous: that of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell, who has his eyes forcibly opened with some obvious instruments of torture.
The film directed by Stanley Kubrick is excellent and as such one of the rare feats, when both the book and the film are great.
We may feel a little guilty for enjoying a book where “ultra-violence” is as present as in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. A cynical remark might be:
- Yes, but it is so beautiful
- The language is horrible, but sublime…
We can learn from this that violence gets you into prison, that the system is wrong, the payback is so awful that ends up by making Alex vomit when he hears…Beethoven.
Apart from Alex, the minister of the “inferior” seems to be a bigger villain at times.
This book is wonderful and a must read. After you finish it maybe we talk about it: what did you think, did you also see the Kubrick film…?
join us at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/14448...
You must read this and you can forget about the rest of the text here.
This is one of the best works that I have ever read. It is one of my absolute favorites and it did not fail to awe me after a third reading.
The language is extraordinary, even if it has crossed my mind that, if I were to hear the same language in a Romanian play I would be outraged. It is a strange situation where the language of the Clockwork Orange makes it such a masterpiece, but then hearing the (translated) language on my street I would have a seizure.
The subject, the heroes are repelling, the words- as much as I understand them- are terrifying.
Alex, the main character keeps saying “horror show”, but this is in the manner of Donnie Brasco, who explained that mobsters use
“Forget about it” all the time, for anything: from forget about it, to excellent, we did, he was good, or she was bad…sometimes the meaning hanging on the tone of voice only.
Horror show seems to mean perfect and reflect the sick obsession with “ultra- violence”- another word from the slang sensational vocabulary used in this fantastic book.
The main theme seems to be the “ultra-violence” and it is portrayed in the most fabulous language ever used by a “brother”…real or fictional. Here are some of these words:
Baboochka, bezoomy, brat, britva, chelloveck, devotchka, droog, grahzny, forella, litso, malchick, millicents and many more.
Perhaps you should study the words before you read A Clockwork Orange. Even if I missed the meaning of a phrase here and there, because of these Anglo- Russian terms, I loved this book.
We come to hate Alex for he is doing: torturing women and homeless people, fighting his own mates. But the punishment raises other issues. I will avoid details, so that you enjoy reading A Clockwork Orange. Much of the pleasure in reading this masterpiece comes from the excellent depiction and not so much from “the action”.
However, what happens raises quite a few questions- how much do you punish a criminal? Are prisons overcrowded? And when they are, do they serve the purpose of rehabilitation or they just torture inmates.
There are some documentaries, some of them on BBC Knowledge can be watched these days, that present the situation in jails that look like and are Hell on Earth.
Yes, criminals must pay for their crimes, but is it just to torture them?
One image from the film A Clockwork Orange is very famous: that of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell, who has his eyes forcibly opened with some obvious instruments of torture.
The film directed by Stanley Kubrick is excellent and as such one of the rare feats, when both the book and the film are great.
We may feel a little guilty for enjoying a book where “ultra-violence” is as present as in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. A cynical remark might be:
- Yes, but it is so beautiful
- The language is horrible, but sublime…
We can learn from this that violence gets you into prison, that the system is wrong, the payback is so awful that ends up by making Alex vomit when he hears…Beethoven.
Apart from Alex, the minister of the “inferior” seems to be a bigger villain at times.
This book is wonderful and a must read. After you finish it maybe we talk about it: what did you think, did you also see the Kubrick film…?
join us at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/14448...
October 29, 2016
“Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn’t everything.”
Still probably the greatest pair of sentences in English literature.
Still probably the greatest pair of sentences in English literature.
November 4, 2020
I read the first one a little hard to read but humorous.
Read
June 19, 2023Am I wrong to give up on this book? It took him so long to write it...He even created a new dialect merging Russian & English slang to imagine a dialect in the future that the next gen could relate to. His views on conditioning the human mind were just as interesting as his silent protest to Pavlov & Skinner.
March 16, 2022
This was one of my favorite books in high school! From a linguistic perspective, this book is brilliant fuses the English language with his Russian influenced Nadstat language. Overall, it was one of the most unique stories I have ever read.
December 9, 2020
You see the "good" and the "bad" from a different perspective. Does ethics matter when it is imposed?
October 12, 2023
Audio book was great
Read
August 3, 2010In English language,Inglise keeles,fiction,novel,cold war fiction
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews