Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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”. Bowling is wondering what to do with a modest sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. Much later (part III), he and his wife attend a Left Book Club meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have participated in the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually enjoys Porteous' company, but on this occasion, his dry, dead classics make Bowling even more depressed. Orwell's brother-in-law, Humphry Dakin, the husband of Orwell's elder sister Marjorie, a 'short, stout, loquacious' man, thought that Bowling might be a portrait of him. He had known Blair (Orwell) since they were youngsters, when the Blairs lived at Henley-on-Thames and later when they lived at Southwold where he married Marjorie. [6]

George lives in a mediocre little house in one of the London suburbs. His marriage is unhappy, his children are insufferable (unless they are sleeping), his job is a dead-end and he feels like his body is starting to fall apart. In other words, he’s got a major case of mid-life crisis. As he wanders around the City, he begins to dwell on his childhood in a tiny market town, the simple joys of fishing and reading that he never managed to recapture past the age of sixteen, and frets about the fact that very soon, the world will be at war and that all he knows will vanish. 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. George Bowling wants to return to the town of his childhood to take a breath of air - to relive the joys of fishing, which was his main hobby and the only true love.Some people have found George Bowling endearing; he isn’t. Orwell draws his caricature sharply. He is human, not a grotesque. But consider the point where George is laid on his bed and considering how women let themselves go after marriage; conning men to get to the altar and then suddenly rushing into middle age and dowdiness. This is from a man who is 45, fat, has false teeth and bad skin and wears vulgar clothes. Orwell is laying on the irony with a trowel. Late in the book George sees an old girlfriend from nearly 30 years previously. She has changed greatly and he barely recognises her (he inwardly reflects that she has aged badly without making the jump that she has not recognised him). George does have moments of clarity when he almost grasps how ridiculous he is, but not quite. I think John Wain was right when he said, "What makes _Coming Up For Air_ so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more." Throughout the adventure, he receives reminders of impending war, and the threat of bombs becomes real when one lands accidentally on the town. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. So he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to the village he remembers as a rural haven of peace and tranquillity. But his return journey to Lower Binfield may bring only a more complete disillusionment ... George Bowling feels trapped in his marriage and in his job as a traveling insurance salesman. He's humorous, middle-aged, overweight, and fearful of an impending war with Hitler. As the title suggests, he feels like he is drowning in his life in present day England.

So this story had a reassuring effect on me. To think, George Orwell went through this--the feeling that everything that meant being alive to you was taken away. Then my father went through it, and now me. The universality of the feeling takes the sting away. If the future they feared became the past I loved, chances are, this will keep happening, as the world continues tumbling along. War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That's to say, who's afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? 'You are,' you say. Yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen.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. Ben sadece yaşamak istiyorum. Ve şu çuhaçiçeklerine, çitin altındaki kızıl korlara balarken yaşıyordum. İçinizde duyarsınız bunu; huzur verici bir şeydir ama aynı zamanda alev gibidir. That’s probably all you need to know about George Bowling. Oh, except that he’s fat. George makes a lot of this in this account of his life. Again, it is something he is resigned to—being called “Tubby” by all and sundry—yet finds vaguely irksome. His creator “George Orwell” (in real life Eric Arthur Blair) was as thin as a rake, and 6 ft 2 in (1.88m)! Perhaps he wanted to make George Bowling his antithesis? But no. There are some similarities between the two, and frequently we see observations made by George Bowling which seem rather too knowing about himself; too astute and objective about the world to be consistent with the thoughts of this character. But the voice is familiar … Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves' Nereden ve nasıl başlasam bilemiyorum. Öncelikle tek sözcükle özetleyeyim de. Mükemmel! Gerçekten mükemmel bir kitaptı. Hayvan Çiftliği ve 1984 ile tanınan George Orwell'in bence ilk okunması gereken eseri. Çünkü zekasını, sözcüklerle oynama becerisini ve muhteşem bir yazarın sinyalini veren çok güzel bir eser bu.