George Orwell is one of my favorite people, in fact I will say that he has shaped the way I see the world- especially my dislike of Communism. I think I got it even before I knew what Communism was.
At Telegraph is a great article that alphabetically covers much of what Orwell was- the man, his works, and his legacy.
Here I have selected things about which I can say something- here they are (what is in italics are my comments)
- A is for Animal Farm
(Animal farm is a great book, even children can enjoy that. There is an animation film based on this story, and even kids love it. The story transcends time and age.)
First published on August 17 1945 by Secker & Warburg, Orwell's allegory about Stalinism – in which a revolutionary uprising by the animals of Manor Farm brings about a self-inflicted totalitarian system – made him famous and has since become a modern classic. It was written in 1943 and 1944 after his experiences fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He later explained that his first-hand experience escaping the Communist purges in Spain – and their misrepresentation by the Left back home – taught him ''how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries''. The book was ready for publication in April 1944, but Victor Gollancz, who had published his first five books, refused to publish it because it attacked the Soviet Union, then an ally. Jonathan Cape agreed to take it but withdrew support – a decision believed to have been influenced by Peter Smollett, who worked at the Ministry of Information and was later revealed as a Soviet agent. This year, further information has come to light about how T S Eliot rejected the piece on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics. As director of Faber and Faber, his 1944 letter – made public by his widow Valerie – praised the book's ''good writing'' and ''fundamental integrity", but said: ''We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.''
- B is for Burma
(I had "Shooting an Elephant" for ancillary something in College. This story is about about Orwell's Burmese days. There is something sad about what Orwell and Maugham write about their Asiatic experience. Makes us feel alien even in our own eyes. Great writing.)
Orwell spent five formative years in his twenties in Burma, joining the Indian Imperial Police in 1922. He acquired considerable responsibilities; when posted to Twante as a subdivisional officer, he was responsible for the security of 200,000 people. His experiences would form the basis of his debut novel, Burmese Days (1934), and two key essays, A Hanging (1931), and Shooting an Elephant (1936). The latter, written from a policeman's perspective, describes conflicted attitudes – disgust at the Empire and at the native population – that many have ascribed to Orwell: ''With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.''
- D is for 'Down and Out'
(If I am happy that I happened to read any book, it is this. Superb piece of writing. It makes you want to do what Orwell did. I posted an account of a lady who met Orwell when Orwell was collecting material for this book. That one was a great piece about Orwell. You will find that here.)
Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell's first full-length work, published in 1933 and drawing on his previous five years' experience of low-living on the breadline. Orwell proved a class-A tramp, showing indefatigable curiosity and courage about the grinding life of Europe's homeless and penniless. He was an undercover investigative journalist avant le lettre, dressing like a tramp, dropping his accent as best he could – although it was remarked upon that his middle-class origins were swiftly detected.
- K is for 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying'
(This is another book of Orwell that I read- a love story, poisoned by the need for money. There is a passage here where Orwell goes biblical, it is fantastic. You feel sad that love takes second place behind money. But that is survival- not just love and sex, but also work and bread. We may not like that, but it is the way life is.)
Gordon Comstock, the protagonist of Orwell's sourly funny novel, is a bookshop assistant, boiling with frustrated literary aspiration. The joyously misanthropic detail of his observations drew on Orwell's own experiences. In October 1934, his aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant in Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead. In the novel, Comstock gets overcome by nausea at the sight of the tomes around him: ''Dull-eyed, he gazed at the wall of books. He hated the whole lot of them, old and new, highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy. The mere sight of them brought home to him his own sterility. For here was he, supposedly a 'writer', and he couldn't even 'write'!''
- N is for 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
(About this, everyone knows. Ultra-pessimistic. I think what big brother failed to do, Google has made possible- especially see how China manages criticism. We need to have a separate post on this.)
It is impossible to overstate the enduring significance of Nineteen Eighty-Four (published June 1949), which has become a key text around the world in holding a mirror up to the actual – and potential – abuses of state power. That Orwell looked at the incoming technology of television and foresaw a time when the box in the corner of the living room might be capable of monitoring people – not just being watched – is just one example of his prescience. The novel is packed with bleakly satirical inventions, and components of the fictional world he constructed have entered into the lexicon as real-world signifiers. ''Doublethink'', the capacity to hold true to a thought that is patently false, in subservience to a prevailing orthodoxy, has become common currency, as has "thought police" and ''thoughtcrime". Variations on the phrase ''Big Brother is Watching You'', have become synonymous with today's surveillance society – not to mention reality TV shows.
Some of the themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four echo Orwell's earlier work. In his essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942), he wrote: ''Nazi theory … specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science', 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.''
By the way, this is the power of money:
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And
though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries,
and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money
suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not
itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her
own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now
abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these
is money."
I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
George Orwell writes like wonder...
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