Matthew Guerrieri is a musician living in Massachusetts, and the author of The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination. At Publishers Weekly, he tagged "five novels, both famous and forgotten, that make Beethoven and/or his most recognizable piece a crucial character," including:A Clockwork Orange by Anthony BurgessRead about the other entries on the list.
The history of a piece of music is inseparable from the history of its fans, so it's worth starting with Burgess's dystopian classic and its anti-hero, Alex, literature's most celebrated Beethoven-lovingsociopath. In the book (unlike Kubrick's film adaptation), it's the Fifth that is used to torture/brainwash Alex into a semblance of conformity, and the psychological weaponization of Beethoven is what finally trips Alex's sense of morality: “It's a sin.” In an interview later in life, Burgess (a composer as well, and who wrote another novel, Napoleon Symphony, that he structurally modeled after Beethoven's Third) imagined that, after the conclusion of A Clockwork Orange, Alex had himself gone on to become a great composer. Read in that light, the book becomes a fantastically lurid portrait of the monstrosity of genius.
A Clockwork Orange is among four books that changed Peter Twohig, Darren Shan's top ten books about outsiders for teenagers, Ian Rankin's six best books, and Laura Hird's literary top ten.
--Marshal Zeringue
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