A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (5 stars)

What's it going to be then, eh?

Back in 2008 when I was trying to think of a name for this blog, I decided it should be the first line from one of my favourite books. After some deliberation I settled on this one, a question asked by Alex at the start of each of the three sections of the book, not only because I liked the book, but because it seemed appropriate for a book review blog.

The main reason I love this book is for its ingenious language. Burgess invents a slang language he calls nadsat for his teenage characters that consists of around 200 words, based mostly on Russian:

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything.

After reading this I feel like govoreeting my horrorshow slovos to my droogs :)

The violence in the book is horrendous, which is the main reason I've never seen Kubrick's film adaptation. Alex's deep, ingrained love of 'the ultra-violence' and the advent of psychological conditioning as a 'cure' lead Burgess to pose the question:

Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Burgess makes it clear that he thinks Alex must be allowed to choose to be good. In the final (21st) chapter, Alex makes a startling turn-around. This chapter has become infamous because it was excluded from the US published version, and Kubrick also elected to leave it out of the film.

Some seem to think the final chapter is a cop out, but I disagree. I think it is a better ending - an enduring lifetime of unending violence seems unlikely for anyone, even a monster like Alex.

5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to giving the movie a viddy, and while it is a faithful adaptation of the book, I just don't think it is anywhere near as good. The crime and the city seemed much less apocalyptic than I imagined from the book, the nadsat slang was toned down, and I felt the whole thing should have just been...darker.

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (2.5 stars)

In Heat, Buford provides an interesting insight into life in a 3-star restaurant in Manhattan, and takes in a variety of prima-donna celebrity chefs and crazy kitchen characters.  The book begins with the author becoming a kitchen slave in Babbo, an Italian restaurant owned by Mario Batali.  Batali is one of the most famous chefs in the US: he had his own show Malto Mario on the food network, and was one of the regular competitors on Iron Chef America.

You first get a taste for the craziness that is to come when Buford describes the behaviour of Marco Pierre White, one of Batali's mentors:

Patrons ("fat ugly bastards") who ordered meat well done were an insult to the kitchen, and on two occasions Marco ordered them to leave his restaurant before they completed their meals...When someone ordered fried potatoes he was so insulted he prepared them himself and charged five hundred dollars.

Buford struggles with the heat and stress of the kitchen, injures himself fairly frequently, and comes home with hands so stinky that even after the Lady Macbeth treatment their odour wakes up his wife like smelling salts.

I found this early part of the book interesting, but it lost my attention as the author began to wander down some fairly boring paths.  I really don't care exactly when people starting using eggs to make pasta, and Buford's hunt through 15th and 16th century cookbooks was tedious.

I thought the book finished strongly with the mad Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini, who is the craziest and most interesting character Buford encounters.  I loved the descriptions of him dining in restaurants and blasting chefs for not sticking to the Tuscan letter of the law:

"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"

and his general attitude towards customers that deviates from the standard 'the customer is always right':

Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick.

I thought Buford did a reasonable job of writing a food book without making a verbal recipe book, but it failed to hold my attention for a significant portion of the story.

2.5 stars.

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (1 star)

After reading the epic that is Shantaram, I was drawn to books about Mumbai, and encouraged by some glowing reviews.  Chandra and Mehta have both produced massive epic tomes, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them, although Maximum City is much, much better than Sacred Games.

Mehta starts out very strongly, with fascinating insight into what it is like to live in the 'Country of the No'.

India is the Country of the No.  That 'no' is your test.  You have to get past it.  It is India's Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders.  Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge.

Mehta is experiencing reverse culture shock by moving his family back to Mumbai after a number of years living in New York (note this is $US!!).

Coming from New York, I am a pauper in Bombay.  The going rate for a nice apartment in the part of south Bombay where I grew up in is $3,000 a month, plus $200,000 as a deposit, interest-free and returnable in rupees.

Mehta also reinforced the impression I got from Shantaram of the slums:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery.  What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community...A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is an empty room in the big city.

There are some brilliant insights into Indian life and politics, like when Mehta follows a local politician on the campaign trail.  The politician visits only the slums, because the rich don't vote:

From the wealthy section of Malabar Hill, the legal residents of the district, the turnout is twelve per cent; from the squatters in the slum colonies, for whom the issue of who comes into power means the difference between living in four walls or on the street, it's eighty-eight per cent...This is the biggest difference between the world's two largest democracies: in India, the poor vote.

Mehta's description of the systemic problems caused by the Rent Act is fascinating.  The Rent Act was introduced immediately after World War II to provide affordable housing and prevent price gouging by fixing rent at a court appointed rate.  As long as the tenant pays rent, they cannot be evicted, and the lease can be transferred to the tenants' heirs.  This law is now politically impossible to repeal, because there will always be more tenants than landlords, and the 2.5 million tenants in Bombay are the most powerful political lobby in the city.  The result is:

Some of the richest people in the city live in rent-controlled bungalows all around Malabar Hill, inherited from their grandparents and great-grandparents...The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 homes a year...There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out.

The section of the book that follows senior police officer Ajay Lal is also interesting and scary.  The justice system is broken and corruption is a way of life.  The courts are useless; there are no costs associated with filing lawsuits so the majority are frivolous and have created a huge backlog, which at the current rate will take 350 years to clear.  In this climate, the police kill criminals in 'encounters' as a fast form of justice.

For ordinary Mumbaikers, the only form of real justice available is from the gangsters, the bhais themselves:

The sense that justice can be obtained from the underworld is so pervasive that the phenomenon has reached its logical conclusion: in November 1999, a senior judge in Bombay himself approached Shakeel [a bhai] for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a 'chit fund', an informal savings scheme.

As Mehta continues his fascination with the gangster 'shooters' and police 'encounter specialists' I began to lose interest.  Mehta seems to want to romanticize these dangerous characters and maintains a huge amount of reverence for them.  However, I do need to concede that a large part of that reverence would have been motivated by fear of what his words could mean for his family's safety, and I respect Mehta has been very brave in writing this book.

The introduction to the dancer 'Monalisa' is brilliant:

On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high class stripper in a New York bar.  The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn't have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.

Unfortunately, this is the point the book really falls apart.  The 'Pleasure' chapter begins well, but soon starts to drag.  There is little interesting development, and the story degenerates into a boring verbose journalistic description of Monalisa's life.

Mehta goes on to treat interesting subjects (such as Bollywood) but just drags each subject out for too long.  The final chapter is the least connected to the others, and should have been dropped.

Overall, there are some brilliant sections in this book, and I learned a lot about Mumbai.  However, it is a horrendous read, and should have been at least 200 pages shorter.  What is it with unedited rambles about Mumbai?

1 star