Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Self help books pale into insignificance in comparison to some of the thoughts expressed in this book. 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. Attending a lecture with his wife Hilda at the “Left Book Club” meeting, he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker, and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have attended the meeting. 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.

The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at lightning speed, as they always do when there's no chance to keep anyone else out of the bathroom. Sometimes I've stood over their cots, on summer evenings when it's light, and watched them sleeping, with their round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter than mine, and it's given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. Orwell is also satirising suburbia, he describes the road on which Bowling lives as a “line of semi-detached torture chambers”. It's five-pence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the smallest print the law allows, that it contains "a certain proportion of neutral fruit-juice. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you've once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day.My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. I am not the least bit surprised therefore that the 17 year old reviewer did not get the same satisfaction reading this book by his favourite author, I can only encourage him to re-visit the book in twenty or thirty years time as a friend of mine has just done, as I am sure his appreciation will grow enormously as he becomes more empathetic with the views of a middle-aged man mourning the passage of time. Running alongside George’s inner disbelief, but eventual resigned acceptance, is writing which captures the very real pre-war anxiety.

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’.

Written in 1938 and published in 1939, in real life it was only to be a matter of months before war was declared. Obviously Orwell wrote this for a comtemporary audience, not one I am sure that is reading the book 70 years on, and yet the obvious parallels with the feelings many people have at any time in the last two centuries that things are changing too quickly and not always for the best are extraordinary and resonant.

Auch hier, ich frage mich ab,wie es moeglich ist, das die Lieferung in die Niederlanden so schnell und problemlos verlaeuft.George also realises that the cemetery has moved out of the village to the outskirts, which had a rather ‘unhomelike look’. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea … There are a lot of people like that. In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. Alcuni passaggi di "Coming up for air" fanno venire i brividi per la loro impietosa lucidità: ma d'altronde cosa aspettarsi da uno dei più grandi autori del Secolo Breve? His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.