Baddies in Books: Alex

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Alex 15

Then we came to a very neat like cantora with typewriters and flowers on the desks, and the like chief desk the top Millicent was sitting, looking very serious and fixing a like very cold glazzy on my sleepy litso. I said:

‘Well, well, well. What makes, bratty. What gives, this fine bright middle of the nochy?’ He said:

‘I’ll give you just ten seconds to wipe that stupid grin off your face. Then I want you to listen.’

‘Well, what?’ I said, smecking. ‘Are you not satisfied with beating me near to death and having me spat upon and making me confess to crimes for hours on end and then shoving me among bezoomnies and vonny perverts in that grahzny cell? Have you some new torture for me, you bratchny?’

‘It’ll be your own torture,’ he said, serious. ‘I hope to God it’ll torture you to madness.’

And then, before he told me, I knew what it was. The old ptitsa who had all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a better world in one of the city hospitals. I’d cracked her a bit too hard, like. Well, well, that was everything. I thought of all those kots and koshkas mewing for moloko and getting none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress. That was everything. I’d done the lot, now. And me still only fifteen.

Anthony Burgess · A Clockwork Orange

15

Hans Castorp

Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

Thomas Mann

"...when at age fifteen he had the chance to watch from a front-row seat as the Hansa, a new double-screw mail-steamer, was launched from the docks of Blohm and Voss, he painted a strikingly good watercolor of the trim ship..."

15

Victor Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley

"When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm..."

15

John the Savage

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

"“You are fifteen,” said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. “Now I may teach you to work the clay.”"

15

P.B. Jones

Answered Prayers

Truman Capote

"...he wanted to know how old I was – I said eighteen, though I was really three years younger..."

15

Amory Blaine

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost completely slew it — but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys..."

15

Ernie

'The Swan'

Roald Dahl

"He took the gun and the box of bullets and went out to see what he could kill. He was a big lout of a boy, fifteen years old this birthday..."

15

Maurice Spandrell

Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley

"He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought..."

15

Adrian Albert Mole

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Sue Townsend

"Dear Aunt Clara, I am a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. My grandma tells me that I am attractive..."

15

Monroe Stahr

The Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was fifteen..."

15

Charles Bovary

Madame Bovary - Provincial Matters

Gustav Flaubert

"In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen..."

15

Billy Behan

Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow

"I was fifteen years old and I had a hundred dollars in my pockets..."

15

Henry Chinaski

Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski

"I was 15 years old and in love with her and I was covered with boils and there was nothing that either of us could do."