Reading 1001 discussion

Rating: 4 stars.

Burgess tells an extraordinary brutal story of Alex. He is just 14 years old and is involved in violent beatings, stealing and finally killing with his friends.
I already watched the movie and I, of course, remember it very well. Still, the book is much more focused on Alex's life after brutal happenings. It is also about him going to prison and finally, growing up, getting over violence.
It is written with abundant use of a specific language - nadsat, influenced mostly by Russian. For me it wasn't such a problem, because my mother tongue is a Slav language.
Still, it was very difficult read for me, because it gets very brutal and black. I had at times difficulty to keep reading. Still, it was a rewarding one.

Read 2010. This was a very violent book and for that it was repulsive. The use of the made-up language helped soften the violence because it wasn't in the language most understood and visualized by the reader. It is a story of government control over man's freedom of choice and incorporates aversive therapy and behavior modification through aversive therapy. The final chapter, which I guess was not accepted by the United States because the author said the US people wouldn't like the good ending was okay but the author's point is that violence and delinquency is inherent in adolescence and goes away with maturity. The kind of violence these youth had was beyond the violence of normal youth development and I don't believe that a person can go from an clearly sociopathic bent to normality.

Read 2016: I must have not minded this book's negative aspects too much when I rated it, because I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, but I did not really like this book. It was an interesting text, for the way it drew the reader into an invented dialect that started out seemingly unreadable. I live in a 'bad neighborhood' and know people whose lives are not too different from the lives portrayed in this novel, so it was relateable. And I did study Russian for a few semesters, so the made-up language was not as hard for me to follow. This will not be a reread any time soon though and I have never recommended it to anyone so far.