Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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' 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. Coming 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. The true beauty of the book is its description of the settings. A large chunk of the story is taken by George describing his youth and young adulthood in a time lost to us forever: before the War to End All Wars, then the world seemed a much safer place. As George puts it, it's a time you either know already and don't need to be told about, or a time you don't know and could never understand. Also important is Orwell's prescience for the future: war is looming, and George is well aware that it might change the world forever once again. 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.

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 …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. But when he arrives home, George finds his cover has been blown, and Hilda knows he was not on a work trip. She is convinced her husband has been off with a woman somewhere, having an affair. George feels caught in an impossible situation. Should he go along with this fiction, or should he come clean and say that he had been on a journey into his past—in which case he would also have to tell her about gambling on the horses, winning, and then squandering the cash? We never know. He’d think it was a wonderful thing that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom.” 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. After ruminating about his life, and where he has ended up, George decides he deserves a holiday, to spend his seventeen quid he won on a horse, and has managed to keep secret from Hilda. On a whim decides to return to Lower Binfield, and catch those carp which he had somehow never got around to catching as a child.

Ognuno di noi ha un ricordo struggente della propria giovinezza, quella di George fu interrotta niente meno che dalla Grande Guerra ed ora, mentre ricorda, il mondo sta andando ad ampie falcate verso il secondo tragico conflitto mondiale, ed ora, mentre leggo, Hamas ha attaccato Israele e probabilmente molti dei ventenni che lo hanno fatto, nemmeno hanno mai sentito parlare di guerre mondiali, hanno solo sentito parlare dei loro territori invasi. The world changes constantly, as do people. But some events are like a shift in tectonic plates: the change is sudden and abrupt. The Great War changed something fundamental in the English lifestyle and George is just the right age to have watched the old world die and the new one take over. As such, he is disillusioned and feels disconnected from the world in which he lives because it is not the one he grew up in. He feels like an expat in his own country. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.” I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.” 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.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. He takes us from his earliest memories through his present, and all this remembering leads him to an adventure. It’s an unusual plot construction, but it allows Orwell to give us the long view of middle-class England in the first half of the 20th century. Kitapta böyle o kadar çok güzel nokta var ki... Mesela anlatım şeklini de çok sevdim hikayenin. Yazar direkt kahramanın bugünkü hayatından başlayıp geçmişe dönüp tekrar şu anki haline geliyor ama ne siz eski okur olarak kalıyorsunuz ne de kahraman eski kahraman olarak kalıyor. Adeta birlikte yoğruluyorsunuz hikayenin içinde. The end of the book is pretty downbeat and this tone characterises the whole book and therefore might not be to everyone's taste. I loved it. I've already bought Orwell's ' Keep the Aspidistra Flying' which I will read soon. If you like any of the books I list at the start of this review then I'm confident you'd enjoy this book too. 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.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism. Uncle Ezekiel is a shop owner with quite liberal beliefs, being a ' little Englander'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration. 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 is an unhappily married, middle-aged insurance salesman and social conformist. One day, after an unexpected windfall of cash, he embarks on a sabbatical journey to his childhood home hoping to find a respite from his miserable existence and to re-discover the mythical ’Walden Pond’ of his youth. But, much to his dismay, George discovers that every touchstone of his upbringing has been obliterated by urban sprawl and development. 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:

Customer reviews

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. 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. A novel that explores the pastoral life and experiences of youth in Edwardian England before the First World War as a memory of a man who is anxious about his own existence and pessimistic about his nation's inevitable progress towards another world war.