Coming up for air (edició 1962)

In this book Orwell writes about George Bowling, a 45 year old insurance salesman who decides to visit the place where he grew up without telling his wife. He is feeling disillusioned with life and hopes this trip will bring some colour back into his life. I really enjoyed this little book and it really feels as if Orwell is leaning heavily on his own experiences throughout. On returning to the area of his childhood home he quickly realises that nostalgia isn't all it's cracked up to be. ( )

A recollection of a middle-aged insurance agent who wins a little money on a bet and decides to revisit his childhood hometown. The language and descriptions of boyhood and growing up during the changes of industrialization are vivid and lovely, as is the inevitable disappointment when he returns to a drastically changed hometown. ( )

Boğulmamak İçin bitti. Orwell'dan okuduğum 4. kitap oldu.

Kitabın ilk 50-60 sayfası, yazar konudan konuya atladığı için çok sıkıcıydı. Eğer yazara daha önceden aşina olmasaydım kitabı okumayı kolayca bırakabilirdim ama yazarı sevdiğimden kitaba 1 ay ara verdikten sonra kaldığım yerden devam edip kitabı bitirdim. Kitap yazarın diğer kitapları gibi düşünce ve eleştiri ağırlıklı ama diğerleri gibi belirgin bir politik mesaj vermiyor daha çok aklına ne geldiyse eleştirmiş izlenimi veriyor. Kitabı bitirdikten sonra ben şimdi ne okudum :joy: hissine kapılsamda kitabı genel olarak sevdim.

Çevirisinde bir sorun göremedim, gönül rahatlığıyla okuyabilirsiniz.

Not: Kitap Orwell'a başlamak için ideal bir kitap değil. ( )

"Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week-well, next week is a long way off."

'Coming Up for Air' is effectively a social document echoing Orwell’s socialist views and tells the story of Fatty George Bowling, a middle-aged man who lives with his wife, Hilda, and their two children on Ellesmere Road, London. George is a very ordinary man in a safe insurance job but who is fearful of the future in which he sees the approaching war.

George feels trapped on Ellesmere Road and in particular by the ironically named Cheerful Credit Building Society and it's owner Sir Herbert Crum. George believes that each deceives the inhabitants in to thinking they own their houses when in reality they don't expanding on what Orwell regards as the upper classes ruling over the working class proletariat and continuing the socialist ideals about fairness and equality first muted in his earlier novel The Road to Wigan Pier. Similarly, George and Hilda attend a meeting on fascism, clearly drawing parallels with what was happening on mainland Europe at the time.

After introducing the Bowlings and the world they live in, readers are transported to George's childhood life in Lower Binfield, where he remembers how ‘it was summer all the year round’, his father’s seed business, his mother’s cooking and in particular his love for fishing. Childhood for George is ‘ a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing’, reminding us that we are all nostalgic at times and how we sometimes dream of recapturing past glories but as George informs us, ‘There’s time for everything except the things worth doing’. George eventually enlists for the army and after being demobbed moves away from Lower Binfield.

Twenty-five years later George returns, without telling Hilda, to spend a week in Lower Binfield but finds that the streets that he remembers has been swallowed up by a much larger town as is no longer recognisable, where virtually all his childhood shops have changed hands and no one remembers him of his family, including the local vicar and his first love Elsie Flowers’ whose ‘deeply feminine’ look had disappeared and she was now ‘a fat old woman muddling about a frowzy little shop’. But most importantly to George is the fact that the pond at Binfield House where he once saw some huge carp which he had always dreamt of catching had become a rubbish dump. Realising that the last piece of his childhood has been ravaged by time George returns home only to find out that Hilda has discovered his lies about his whereabouts.

George is a likeable if highly flawed character whereas the female characters are strictly two-dimensional but this shouldn't really detract from this book. Orwell uses irony to portray how the effects of an earlier war has changed society but also reminds us that actions have consequences in our personal lives as well and no matter how much we wish it, it is impossible to turn back the clock. Similarly he reminds us that the future is largely out of our control and instead we should make the most of the present. Whilst this book may not be of the same calibre as his more famous books, Animal Farm and 1984, it does how forward thinking much of his writing was and shows that many Orwellian themes and ideas are still applicable today, as such I feel that it still deserves to be read. ( )

Açıkçası kitabı okurken biraz boğulduğumu itiraf etmem gerekir. Bunun dışında kitaptaki atmosfer George Orwell'ın bilindik atmosferiydi ve beni içine çekti. Dediğim gibi biraz zorlanarak okudum ama sevdim. ( )