I spent some time wondering how this book has been translated into other languages, though once I learned how much of Nadsat (the strange slang used by the narrator) is based on Russian, it became a bit clearer. By the way, the movie concludes without that final chapter. I personally think either way it is still good. Evidently, it was removed when it was first published in America, and there is debate on whether the book is better with or without it. I think most versions now have the deleted final chapter (mine does) included. I then just had to watch Kubrick's movie version and Malcolm McDowell is perfect as Alex, even though in the movie he is much older than book Alex's alarmingly (especially considering the violence he does to others) young age of 15. Real horrorshow, as Alex would say.Alex is the main protagonist, and a nightmare example of being a psychopath in a dystopian society. By the end of the book, this NADSAT slang will come more naturally. If your copy of A Clockwork Orange doesn't have a glossary, then you can download and print after an internet search, as I did. Having a glossary of the NADSAT language used by Alex and his droogs is a must. These aesthetic competences are abundantly represented in this book. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness echoes equally through his music, his novels, his journalism and his literary criticism. There are in fact many Burgesses to choose from: novelist, composer, teacher, drinker, linguist, husband, rebel, journalist, diarist, extrovert, family man, cook, smoker, art critic, literary critic, television critic, television personality, collector of matchbooks, and - last but not least - poet. He was many things at once, some of them seemingly irreconcilable.

Now he no longer appears on our screens, it is easy to forget that Burgess was an irrepressible international literary figure whose work was disseminated through the mass media of the 1970s and 1980s. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its remarkable range of themes are all firmly present in Burgess's poetry. Perhaps his most famous example is A Clockwork Orange (1962), originally an indifferently-received novella which was later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, and provided Burgess with plentiful opportunities to explain his particular artistic vision. Through over fifty published books, thousands of essays, and countless other drafts and fragments, he articulated the struggles, freedoms and changes that he saw around him, and predicted many more to come. John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer.

Anthony a clockwork orange author