Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
read: 2012

Hey, an Orwell book I read recently!  I visited Barcelona in the spring of 2010, and some of the things I saw there made me interested in the Spanish Civil War.  Orwell fought in it and wrote Homage to Catalonia as an account of his experience.  He alternates between telling what he saw first-hand and giving an overview of the politics that led to the war and shaped the outcome.  His personal story is jarring for the extent to which it shows how the world has changed - few people I know would sacrifice life and limb to fight for ideology in a foreign country, and they certainly wouldn't complain that there was too little shooting if they did.  The political chapters are confusing with the acronyms of the various political parties involved, but Orwell effectively conveys how that divisiveness and confusion contributed to the downfall of the left and Franco's rise to power.  Probably more than anything, the book is remarkable for de-romanticizing military service; war is not just courage in the face of death but also resilience in the face of boredom, dwindling supplies of cigarettes and candle wax, and pubic lice.

Animal Farm

Animal Farm
by George Orwell
read: approximately 1997
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #31, Guardian 1000 Novels, Hugo Award (Retroactive)

Another book I read a long time ago and remember little of.  You've got to give Orwell a ton of credit for writing a history of Stalinist Russia that high school students can relate to.  Were the animals just to make the story more understandable, or was there symbolism in the allegory?  I'd have to re-read to have an opinion on it.

1984

1984
by George Orwell
read: approximately 1996
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #13, Guardian 1000 Novels

Several years after Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he wrote Brave New World Revisited.  It sounds like a sequel, but it's really a non-fiction follow-up, where he discusses the ways in the which the world is moving towards the world he outlined in Brave New World and how his book predicts some technological and societal changes.  He also spends a good number of pages comparing and contrasting Brave New World and 1984.  So it was probably unfortunate that I read both Brave New World and Brave New World Revsited before 1984; I was pre-disposed to think, "Sure, that's great, but it's no Brave New World."

I did like 1984, though I read it so long ago that many of the specifics are lost to me.  I think the post-World War II fear of Stalinist Russia is hard for me to understand.  The madmen of today are local in scope; Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il might torture or murder their own populace, but there's no serious danger that their monstrosity will spread across the globe.  But in 1948, just a couple years after Hitler was defeated, it probably seemed inevitable that Stalin would make his own effort to take over the world.  Now the idea seems fanciful, like something out of a James Bond movie.  To 16-year-old me, 1984 was a great work of fiction, but its political impact was a bit lost on me.