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Derek Wilson dwils — Generally, noir plots are not particularly believable, so the noir writer must be skillful enough either to make you believe in spite of it all or to make you not care whether you believe in the first place. (Jim Thompson specializes in the former; Cornell Woolrich specializes in the latter.) This time, Bruno Fischer did not quite succeed in making me believe. Fools Walk In is an example of transgressive noir, the subgenre in which the protagonist, presumably someone not much different from the reader, crosses over to the noir side. Usually the protagonist is driven by financial temptation, but in Fools Walk In, Larry Knight is motivated by the simple desire to escape his miserably unexciting life. When the novel begins, Larry is driving home to New York from Kentucky, where he has been visiting his brother, George. Larry lives with his sister--a shrill, self-pitying, dominating old maid--and he had hoped to convince George to take her. Of course, he had so no such luck. Add to this the fact that Larry is toiling in the world's most pathetic job--he's a high school English teacher, for God's sake!--and he is ripe to transgress when he picks up a gangster's moll who is on the run with $20,000. Larry soon finds himself in hiding with gangsters of the sort who talk earnestly about "capers," and, for a high school English teacher, he proves to be unaccountably attractive to gangster women. If only all English teachers had such latent powers!

Matias Bautista bauti — عنوان: «همه چیز عوض می­شه»، اثر: «دیوید مامت، و شل سیلوراستاین»؛ برگردان: «مرال دهقانی»، نشر: «قم، فراگفت آزاد گرافیک، چاپ نخست ۱۳۸۲، در ۹۵ ص، عکس، شابک: ایکس-964772117» موضوع: فیلمنامه؛ در کتاب اصلی «دیوید مامت» ن‍وی‍س‍ن‍ده‌ نخست ذکر شده است. ا. شربیانی

钱 梦秋 mengqiu9111e36 — Oh my brothers, viddy well this like review of a horrorshow dobby book called A Clockwork Orange, written by this real oomny chelloveck Anthony Burgess. In it, this molodoy young malchick Alex, or Your Humble Narrator, goes around with his droogies drating and shop-crasting and the like, all for a bit of pretty-polly and some of the old in-out in-out. But poor Alex snuffs a starry old ptitisa one nochy, mistaken-like, and is caught by the grahzny millicents, bog blast them, and sent away to the stripey-hole, there to be leered at by horrible vonny perverts and all manner of filthy prestoopnicks. At the Staja, our long-suffering narrator is picked for this new and like experimental treatment that will make him a right-good young malchick again, by making him sick-up whenever the thought of ultraviolence should enter into his gulliver. Then our poor little droogie is thrust back into the wicked world all on his oddy knocky, forsaken by his pee and em, given tolchocks reasonless by his old droogs, and not like even able to put his rookers up in self-defense, or look at a pair of horrorshow groodies, or slooshy the lovely sounds of Ludwig van, without having the sickness well-up on him blurp blurp blurp. Fret you not, my little droogies, for in the end Alex is cured . . . but if it’s only the sinny version of A Clockwork Orange by that great bolshy bearded veck Stanley Kubrick you’ve viddied, if maybe you messeled that was the like whole of the story, then read you on o my brothers and learn all proper. And believe me or kiss-my-sharries when I tell you that the whole raskazz is told in this choodessny wordy style, like nothing you ever viddied before. If the above is opaque, frustrating, or irritating to you, well, let’s just say Anthony Burgess’s own Nadsat — the slangy dialect comprised of Russian jargon, skewed syntax, and odd bits of Cockney rhyming slang in which the whole of A Clockwork Orange is narrated — is much better than mine. And, after the first few pages, attentive readers should have no difficulty navigating the linguistic tangle of little Alex’s unique speech — its strange rhythms and playful usage having become a sheer pleasure by novel’s end. Compelling too is the person of Alex, the bright, vicious, ignorant, selfish, and strangely endearing little monster at the heart of the story. In a near future London — a dystopian world of anarchic street gangs, dingy flat blocks, mandatory labor laws, and an all-pervasive statist government — Alex is a fifteen year old with an exceedingly active social life. He’s out most nights with his friends, stealing from stores, taking drugs, robbing and raping people at random, all with a care-free abandon and lack of self-awareness more in keeping with kids at the playground than serial criminals. And, despite his vileness, the reader cannot help but like him. His narrative voice is charming, his youthful enthusiasm almost relatable, and the light-hearted innocence with which he approaches his despicable acts has a way of distancing the reader from the real horror of the events depicted. So too does the Nadsat lingo form a barrier between the reality of what is transpiring and Alex’s filtered perception of it. This kind of distancing is absolutely necessary for a reader if they are to sympathize with Alex enough to follow his character arc, and if this aspect of the novel had not worked, the entire story would have fallen flat. But work it does, and work brilliantly, and it pulls the reader along as Alex is arrested for killing an old woman in a botched burglary attempt, is betrayed by his droogie companions, thrown into an overcrowded state jail where he becomes the well-behaved pet of the prison chaplain, and, finally, selected for a Pavlovian experimental rehabilitation technique that will transform him into something else completely. Ludovico’s Technique is a form of aversion therapy geared specifically for the elimination of the kind of brutal criminal impulses Alex and the other youth gangs exhibit. Our Humble Narrator is given a drug that induces severe nausea, and forced to watch films depicting acts of rape and of violence — both intimate and large scale, as in the case of Nazi concentration camp footage. It works. Alex becomes meek as a lamb, outwardly a model Christian who quite literally presents the other cheek when subjected to a beating, and he is promptly released from prison after only a few years. Great news for the government which, we are told offhandedly, will soon need the prison space for political cases. A Clockwork Orange follows a deliberate structure of three sections of seven chapters each (more on the ‘controversial’ final chapter twenty-one at the end of this review). The first seven deal with Alex’s nocturnal habits, his leadership issues amongst his gang, his home life, and arrest. The next section concerns his time in prison and rehabilitation through the Ludovico Technique. The third section mirrors the first quite deliberately, as a defenseless Alex emerges back into the world, and is subjected to neglect, abuse, and manipulation by those that see in him a perfect tool to use against the government. It is clear that Alex has become something less than human, that he is a thing without choices, lacking even the ability to assert his humanity in the face of those that wish to take advantage of him. Now, maybe that is a kind of justice, but Burgess is presenting a more complete argument than a mere who-deserves-what. In this future world, where the state wishes to smooth every square peg under its control — by knocking corners off if necessary — Alex’s plight is indicative of the lengths at which societies will go to suppress individuality. As Alex sees it, his ultraviolence is a form of self-expression, a spot of kroovy-red color in a gray, conformist world. He makes it quite clear that he is no victim of circumstance or neglect or cognitive deficiency — on the contrary, he chooses evil because he wishes to do evil. Not an attitude that is easy to embrace, but Burgess is concerned with elaborating on the fullness of the moral equation of choice in A Clockwork Orange; that goodness cannot exist without evil or the choice of evil, and that coerced goodness, goodness that is imposed and not chosen, is inhuman. Alex, a pitiful puppet by the book’s end, has been stripped of his humanity by the so-called therapy that was to turn him into a good little boy again. He has become a clockwork orange. Which, if you were wondering, is an old bit of Cockney slang Burgess had always been fond of, “queer as a clockwork orange,” being about as queer a thing as could be. Alex, like all of us, is organic, imperfect, capable of sweetness and acidity, but he is reduced to a mechanism, a wind-up toy that behaves only as the state wishes him to behave. Even the best that was in him, such as his exuberance, initiative, and his love of music, has been taken away. Indeed Alex, who holds himself above the run-of-the-mill malchicks and devotchkas of his age group for his appreciation of fine music, cannot even indulge in the simple civilized pleasure of of listening to lovely lovely Ludwig van without feeling suicidal. Ultimately, everything about him that was human, aside from his capacity to suffer, is sliced away as he is slotted into the acceptable mold society has prepared for him. But that is not the full story, for malenky Alex becomes a political pawn, first used by a radical opposition group, then by the government itself. He’s come full circle, in a way, and is given back his free will by the same people that took it away in the first place. Those familiar with the Kubrick film can no doubt picture the triumphant ending as Alex, recovering from a forced suicide attempt at the hands of revolutionaries, is feted by the Minister of the Interior or Inferior and given all manner of bribes until, finally, a horrorshow great stereo is wheeled in blasting the Ode to Joy and Alex smecks as he slooshies the sweet strains of Beethoven and finally realizes, as visions of sex and bloodshed swirl electrically around in his gulliver, that, in his words, “I was cured all right.” That’s the end of chapter twenty, the end of the original American version of the book and the Kubrick film. But Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange with twenty-one chapters, three equal sections of seven adding up to twenty-one — a number that represents coming of age. What comes as a big surprise to those only familiar with the American version (cut with Burgess’s permission, but not endorsement) is that in the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange little Alex grows up. Chapter twenty-one starts exactly as chapter one, only the name of Alex’s droogs are different. He’s back out in the world, cured, viscous and nasty as ever, teaching a new generation of droogs the pleasures of the old dirty twenty-to-one. But Alex is changing, he’s uneasy and bored with the senselessness of his life. Burgess talks about this in his introduction to the complete 1986 edition of the novel, saying that the sort of mindless and unthinking destructiveness of Alex’s nighttime pursuits is really the purview of the young, and that with maturity youth outgrows such impulses. While that’s an optimistic view, and an accurate one in many senses, I don’t think Burgess means it to excuse away the nightmare reality of his world as somehow the natural state of things. Indeed, Burgess’s near future London shows many of the hallmarks of today’s society, in which parents are terrified to discipline their egomanical children and a shallow youth culture that prizes a lack of self-restraint as the ultimate form of self-expression has become one of the dominant social forces of our age. Burgess is saying that the same impulses that would lead a government to treat its citizens like rats in a Skinner-box, the same beliefs in determinism and therapy-over-responsibility that lead to the Ludovico Technique, are the same basic notions that have given rise to the nanny-state mentality today. A mentality that can create a world like Alex’s London, in which the night belongs to youthful predators that live completely separate lives from the adult world around them. But, as Burgess asserts, some of them at least will tire of the emptiness of destruction and search for a more meaningful life. Certainly Alex does, and he himself realizes that he is, shockingly enough, on his way to growing up when he encounters his ex-droog Pete at the end of the novel. Pete has a job, an apartment, a wife — in short, Pete has a future. Alex decides he wants one too, and he makes that decision all on his own. And that, in the end, is the whole point of the book. Just as the unnatural goodness Alex was forced to endure was inhuman, so was the idea that he was a purely evil creature. It all comes down to freedom of choice, and Alex, finally, begins making the right choices. We don’t see what sort of regrets he will live with, or if he’ll ever be able to make the leap from leader-of-droogs to ordinary Joe — but he has at last chosen a new direction and that is what is important.To just leave the book after twenty chapters, or conclude the film with a triumphalist resumption of evil is, as Burgess says, to tell a fable. A Clockwork Orange the novel is more optimistic, and presents a more complete moral message by daring to suggest that free will is crucial to humanity precisely because people are never all one thing or the other, that they can and must choose their own fate, and are always capable of doing so. Burgess wrote this at a time when there was serious discussion of using aversion therapy on criminals. Forty years later, that no longer seems to loom in our near future. So what is the relevance of A Clockwork Orange today? If anything the notion of psychological determinism is now stronger than ever and forms the basis of our pervading pop-psychology, the ‘all powerful’ state is increasingly looked upon to regulate the private lives of its citizens, and so many voices are raised to decry their own singular and especial victimhood that one wonders how humanity ever survived without the firm hand of political correctness on the back of its neck. No, it isn’t the Ludovico Technique, but the thought police are alive and well in the form of corporate-sponsored ‘sensitivity training’ courses, and in the cynical pedantries of media-assassins that stalk the wings of public opinion, antennae a-quiver, alert to any infraction or unclean utterance. Conformity of thought is the purpose of processes that claim to uphold our distinctiveness as individuals, but instead call attention to and magnify our differences and terrify us into guarding our every word. And what of a vapid, illiterate, and apathetic youth culture, who underwent ego-reinforcement rather than education, and perceive self-indulgence as the sole good? As bad as A Clockwork Orange? Of course not, but take away the extremes of the story, dig through the juicy pulp to get at the hard little seeds within it, and you’ll see a reflection of our own world staring right back at you. If you liked this review, be sure to check out my review site, DEEP DOWN GENRE HOUND

Rupesh Rajendran rupeshrajendran — very surprising ending - strange book but kept me hooked the whole read