Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Dei 3 libri, questo è certamente il più avvincente ed il più compiuto: George ha combatutto nella disumanizzante lotta di trincea della Grande Guerra, affiancando i suoi ricordi allo spettro della Seconda Guerra Mondiale ormai imminente. The book's themes are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories, and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage, and getting old. This device, although it has the important virtue of making the narrative clear and easy to read, tends to falsify the character slightly since [Bowling's] uncanny perception where his own feelings are concerned makes him a little less of the ordinary mortal which his behaviour would show him to be.

Domestic comedy then, we nod sagely, and enjoy being appalled and sometimes uncomfortably identifying with George Bowling’s private thoughts about his daily life. His namesake, the author had been too young to fight in World War I, but had fought in Catalonia, in the Spanish civil war, initially for the Republican army, although the politics became very complicated. Auch hier, ich frage mich ab,wie es moeglich ist, das die Lieferung in die Niederlanden so schnell und problemlos verlaeuft. Hemmed in on every side ̶ by job, home, history – Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. One day, after winning some money from a bet at the races, George steals away from his family to visit the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before.

This painful memory seems to have sensitized him to – and given him a repugnance for – what he sees as the marching ravages of "Progress. The beginning is blackly, excruciatingly funny, as he expresses his frustration about his daily slog.

This section reminded me very much of ' Cider with Rosie' (one of my favourite books), with the key difference that this is fiction. Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service.It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. The second section is packed full of nostalgic descriptions, but as part of a novel this is overlong and rather self-indulgent. Mellors, who was deeply bitten with this astrology business, was putting several quid on the horse and went down on his knees to me to do the same.

The desire to get inside the whale- or to admit that you are already inside it, as Orwell refuses to condemn Miller for admitting- was understandable then, and it's understandable now. The Sunday Times reviewer on this novel comments that Coming Up for Air is ‘Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic’, which is certainly not fully true. There is a overwhelming sense of longing; a grasp for something out of reach; a straining to recapture some of that lost idyllic time. Orwell is also satirising suburbia, he describes the road on which Bowling lives as a “line of semi-detached torture chambers”.

Remarkably prescient and demonstrating he was already thinking about some of the themes that were later developed so memorably in ' Nineteen Eighty-Four'. It's not that she minds me chipping her, it's only that in some obscure way she thinks it's wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on. Only the church and vicar appear the same, but he is shocked when he discovers an old girlfriend, for she has been so ravaged by the time that she is almost unrecognizable and utterly devoid of the qualities he once had adored. 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. The old car, in which I "cover" my district (I ought to tell you that I'm in the insurance business.

George’s past memories now resemble a ‘sea of bricks’, a ‘continuous row’ of new houses with ‘the roofs rising one above the other like a flight of steps’. Narrated by George Bowling, a man in his late 40s, living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, with an unexciting but stable white collar job, this is a book of reminiscences and a nostalgic look back over his life. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses — the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191 — as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

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. Orwell and his wife were accused of "rabid Trotskyism" and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938.