Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace. The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that (a) speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and (b) his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats. In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin's enemy) and disbanded. Orwell and his wife were accused of "rabid Trotskyism" and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938. However by then they had escaped from Spain and returned to England. George che nella prima parte ricordava, nella seconda ritorna dove è cresciuto. Se mi venisse chiesto di declinare il mio concetto di “tristezza” credo che mi avvarrei delle sue parole A bit of a negative attitude, sure, but he’s comfortable in this life, except that war is coming--just a few years off according to predictions. He was in the last war, and knows the changes war will bring. All this sets him to remembering his childhood, and giving us a picture of life in the early 1900’s, before the first war changed everything.

Sapete che cosa si prova, le sere di giugno. Il crepuscolo azzurro che sembra non finire mai, e l’aria che vi sfiora le guance come setaComing 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. Orwell is also satirising suburbia, he describes the road on which Bowling lives as a “line of semi-detached torture chambers”. Although Bowling dislikes his lot, he accepts it reluctantly, despite his brief foray into his past. 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. As soon as we begin, we sense the sardonic tone recognisable from George Orwell’s autobiographical essays such as “Why I Write” or “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”, (both written later) and think “Ah, this is a comic novel”. The first line is: 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 ...

Set in the pre WWII early 1940s, this book takes us through the life of George Bowling, as a child and adolescent pre-WWI, in a town called Lower Binfield. It is not a particularly miserable childhood, but neither was he the popular boy. His time is the army was no less inspiring; following a minor injury at the front he was sent to a remote stores dump, where he was to monitor non-existent military stores. 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. Orwell kitabı çok yalın bir dille kaleme almış, süslü cümleler yok ama anlatılan onca düşünce var. Kitapta savaşın insanlar ve ekonomi üzerindeki etkilerini görüyor ve orta sınıfa mensup bir sigortacının ağzından okuyoruz. Kitabın dili öyle güzel ki, hem anlatmak istediğini anlatıyor hem de sizi hiç yormuyor, akıp gidiyor. Kitapta hem sistem eleştirisi, hem hayata bakış, yaşamın evreleri, savaş.. bir çok konu işleniyor ve hepsi de kitaba öyle güzel yerleştirilmiş ki, okuduktan sonra ufkunuzun açıldığını hissediyor ve yazarın değindiği noktalarla ilgili düşünmeye başladığınızı fark ediyorsunuz.

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This first section is very reminiscent of H.G Wells, in his social novels such as “Kipps” or “The History of Mr. Polly”. We know that as a boy, Eric Blair did admire H.G. Wells, to the point of him being a favourite author. He enjoyed those novels, because they evoked particular aspects of life in England before the First World War, which made George Orwell recall comparable experiences of his own. Perhaps George Orwell had those novels in mind as a template. Their protagonists are very similar, although George Bowling tells his own story. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. 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, 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. It is said that nostalgia is felt more by the old. But even a four-year old will talk about when they were young, chat with a sense of maturity about when they were “a baby”; have memories of how things used to be. Sometimes they are happy memories, sometimes regretful, sometimes highly coloured in their imagination, just as ours are. The only difference seems to be that for tiny tots, their sense of time seems to stretch out more than for older people:

This final section represents the best writing in the book. Different again from what has gone before, we recognise George Bowling’s reactions, partly from experiences we may have had of our own, and also because the path has been so well prepared. This trip was doomed to failure, because the world moves on. But George Bowling poignantly could not believe that what he so wished to be true, was impossible.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] 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] The female characters are not well drawn and are feminine stereotypes, although Orwell does capture the monotony of suburban life. Usually Orwell’s female characters are more rounded (Julia in 1984), but the focus here is firmly on George Bowling and he certainly perceives the women around him in two-dimensional ways. George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. Although Eric Blair was born in British India, in what he described as a “lower upper middle class” family, from the age of one he spent most of his childhood in England with his mother and two sisters. They lived at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire while their father was a civil servant in British India. Although his origins were slightly more genteel than George Bowling’s, Eric Blair’s friends were similar. He attended a day school rather than a public school in the same area at the same time, and his pursuits were the same as other boys’. Later he spent much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and then at Eton. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family, and this aspect comes through strongly in George Bowling’s memories too. In fact you may feel that whenever George and his friends spot any sort of wildlife—baby thrushes, toads, fishes etc., they seem to want to kill them, and the more dramatically the better.