[показать]It took me forever to finish this little book, and I don't have enough words to describe how much I hated it. In a few words, "A Clockwork Orange" is a famous dystopia that portrays a very dim future where crime is a favorite pastime of the majority of teenagers, violence is an everyday occurrence, and fear is a common state of being. The story is presented from point of view of the narrator, a fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Alex, who is an embodiment of everything that went wrong with the society. Throughout 21 short chapters of the book we follow his troublesome journey that, among other things, includes rapes, murders, imprisonment, and brainwashing. New York Times called "A Clockwork orange" "a brilliant novel...a savage satire on the distortion of the single and collective minds."; I found it dull and almost impossible to read.

For me, the worst part of the experience was that A. Burgess has chosen Russian language to create Nadsat argot that is used by the narrator. To get some idea consider this, "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs. . .and we sat in the Korova Milkbar. . . .The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days. . ." All these Russian-English mix is made even worse by the fact that the author intentionally uses broken English to make the language of the story even more unusual or, in my opinion, simply unbearable. I bet those critics that gave the book so many accolades to the author's creativeness as far as the whole invented argot as concerned have no idea how much of a pain it is to constantly switch between English and Russian words that are written in English letters.

The language, however, is not the only thing that makes me dislike this book. I also did not care for the plot that, had A. Burgess not come up with the whole "stick as many Russian words as you can so that people have no idea what you're talking about" idea, would have been way too simplistic. Unlike "1984" that is also a dystopia, in my opinion, it just does not carry its message well enough. While reading about endless violence and trying to figure out what the sentence means, it is very difficult not to forget what the whole point of the story is. It is obvious that vivid descriptions of rapes and murders are revolting and make the reader not want to live in a world like the one described in the book, but the author, for example, never says why the society is stuck in violence -- is it regular people, mass media, or politics who are to blame? -- and finishes the book with a very strange and pessimistic message, with which I could not agree less.

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