Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Here for a fleeting instant is an impression of the industrial machine as an entity so vast and variegated it attains the quality of a benign natural environment. As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in British India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton in Britain. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family. [1] Beside Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Coming Up For Air ranks as small fry in Orwell’s oeuvre. Yet it endures – is referenced, quoted, read. Maybe that’s because, aside from its own particular charms, its humour, and its descriptive power, it distils an Orwellian preoccupation with imprisonment and escape, his urge to examine human beings in the most straitened circumstances and consider their often thwarted urges for freedom. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet, and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture.

Ve Tanrım ne güzel bir gündü! Genelde martta görülen ve kışın ansızın mücadeleden vazgeçer gibi olduğu şu günlerden. Son birkaç gündür insanların "açık" dediği, gökyüzünün soğuk ve sert bir mavi olup rüzgarın kör bir jilet gibi insanı rendelediği şu pis havalar hakimdi. Sonra rüzgar dindi ve güneş kendine bir fırsat buldu. Bilirsiniz o günleri." Evet o günler ancak bu kadar güzel anlatılabilirdi. There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.” George Bowling, the middle-aged, middle-income protagonist is a great vehicle for Orwell's musings on pre-WW2 England. Bowling is an insightful, straight talking Everyman character who conveys his thoughts with great honesty and self-deprecating humour.Somehow the reality never lives up to the memory. Places from childhood are always smaller and shabbier than imagined. You wonder just why you got on with those folks so well, as you are now all stumbling to find something to say. The holiday destination you dreamed of years ago looks nothing like the pictures in your mind. Yet you still feel a strange kind of ownership over somewhere that used to mean a lot to you, and a sense of loss. Something has drifted away without you noticing.

In this final section George Bowling remembers the slow decline of his father’s seed business, mainly because a large attractive store belonging to a successful chain had opened nearby. George’s father had no idea why his business was failing, when he had always managed to break even before, but he died before he was made bankrupt. This painful memory has made George particularly sensitive and resistant to what he sees as the marching ravages of so-called “progress”. Gone is the side-splitting humour, as we find ourselves immersed in George Bowling’s childhood. This is a world of innocence, and of vivid sights and smells; of boyhood, family life and rambling in the country. We read about George and his older brother, living in their parents’ shop in “Lower Binfield” near the River Thames. It is a seed merchant’s, but selling sundry items too, and has a peculiar dusty smell. Such shops were rapidly becoming outmoded, and going downhill. It saddens George to think of his father, working so hard at a soul-destroying business and barely keeping his head above water: Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939. The end of the book is pretty downbeat and this tone characterises the whole book and therefore might not be to everyone's taste. I loved it. I've already bought Orwell's ' Keep the Aspidistra Flying' which I will read soon. If you like any of the books I list at the start of this review then I'm confident you'd enjoy this book too.

Part 1, Chapter 1

Ognuno di noi ha un ricordo struggente della propria giovinezza, quella di George fu interrotta niente meno che dalla Grande Guerra ed ora, mentre ricorda, il mondo sta andando ad ampie falcate verso il secondo tragico conflitto mondiale, ed ora, mentre leggo, Hamas ha attaccato Israele e probabilmente molti dei ventenni che lo hanno fatto, nemmeno hanno mai sentito parlare di guerre mondiali, hanno solo sentito parlare dei loro territori invasi. The true beauty of the book is its description of the settings. A large chunk of the story is taken by George describing his youth and young adulthood in a time lost to us forever: before the War to End All Wars, then the world seemed a much safer place. As George puts it, it's a time you either know already and don't need to be told about, or a time you don't know and could never understand. Also important is Orwell's prescience for the future: war is looming, and George is well aware that it might change the world forever once again. Suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

Bir de tabii ki George Orwell'in sürekli savaş karşıtı söylemleri ve inceden inceye kimi zaman da bariz bir şekilde anti militarist ve anti kapitalist tiratları kitaba hoş bir lezzet katmış.

PART I

One of Orwell’s less well known novels; it is a rather bleak comic novel written and set in 1938/1939. It is a well written novel about nostalgia, the lower middle classes, relationships between men and women and middle age. Orwell is primarily a political writer and as he said himself, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Given works like 1984 and Animal Farm, it isn’t surprising that this one can be forgotten. Let’s begin near the end, with Orwell hurrying to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four in the face of worsening tuberculosis. A writer living in a state of withdrawal from society, from England, on the Scottish island on Jura in 1947-48. He produces a novel that pushes the idea of human captivity to new, nightmarish limits. Winston Smith is a minor official in a totalitarian slave-state where absolute conformity is the rule, submission to the will of the party – embodied by the totemic Big Brother – is expected in all things, and even thought of dissent is punishable by death – accompanied by torturous mental reprogramming: ‘Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.’