Greetings, O my brothers! My appypolly loggy for this. I don’t mean to gavoreet about every book read, but this one is real horrorshow for the sarky, so I couldn’t resist the urge. Most of you likely slooshied about Clockwork Orange through the sinny, but it turns out it was a horrorshow book long before that Kubrik veck got his rookers on it. Problem is, as you might viddy by now, is that chelloveck, Anthony Burgess, used some bezoomny slovos, so that one viddy at the page and you feel like you’ve been tolchocked hard in the gulliver.

So really I don’t have much to say about Clockwork Orange, other than it sounds like it was written after Anthony Burgess had a stroke in his college Russian class. Oddly enough, by the end of chapter one I felt like I had remembered everything I forgot from my college Russian class. Having successfully finished the book, I think I can safely list Nadsat as a foreign language on my resume.

The story follows Alex, your average trendy, fashionable teenager with a group of close friends, a keen interest in music, the strength of a drunken gorilla and the charity and goodwill of a nest of wasps. Alex’s hobbies include Beethoven, nights out with his friends, milk bars (guess that means he’s a Zelda fan?) and sprees of motiveless violence that would make the most hardcore Neo-nazi, Khmer Rouge member, and GOP voter put down their guns and say, “Dude…you might want to cool down a bit.” After a few romps through the town, bullying and robbing random bystanders, raping anyone between the age of ten and ten thousand, and swimming in enough blood to negotiate with a pharaoh, Alex’s droogs (friends) challenge him for leadership of the gang and betray him to the millicents (police).

While not a fan of prison at first, Alex soon realizes that the state, in attempt to prevent him from committing anymore acts of ultra-violence on helpless victims, has thrown him into close quarters with people full of blood who are helpless to leave the cell. After he playfully stomps another prisoner’s head into mush underneath his boot, the state rethinks their rehabilitation techniques, and throws Alex into an experimental program that aims to create a Pavlovian sickness every time he witnesses acts of violence. It works, and they release him into the wild to go his merry way, find himself, and to get so violently ill that the only reason he doesn’t vomit out his stomach is that it’s roped to his anus by his intestines.

The story is simple and straightforward…you knnow…discounting the language barrier so steep that Trump wants to put it on our southern border. The “Clockwork Orange” of the title is Nadsat for “mechanically responsive man,” or Alex, and it asks some deep questions about the nature of choice and free will as an integral part of humanity, as well as showing how in spite of being the “good guys,” the government seems more interested in manipulating people for political gain rather than actually helping them.

The book is short, and the language is quite honestly presented in a way that you figure it out soon enough, so I can give this my seal of approval. And now I want to sink my zoobies into some groodies, and have a go at the old in-and-out, so I have to go find my zheena.