Coming Up for Air: Annotated Edition

by George Orwell

George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Historical Fiction, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Reviews

[İntellecta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I`ve read the book “Coming Up for Air” written by George Orwell. He was a British author who`s native born name is Eric Arthur Blair. He lived from (*1903 to † 1950). Orwell`s book is a tragedy which is combined with a lot of humour. It`s not only based on the historical events of this story, but also based on incredible aphorisms which consequently motivates the reader to deal with the details and messages. It´s a very personal book which broaches the issue of a normal childhood combined with the fear of the therefore upcoming World War. Moreover he uses the example of George Bowling to narrate the uprooting of the lower middle class after World War One, which failed by searching for a way out. All in all it`s a very interesting and especially emotional book. It leads to unconscious interests in the personal story and historical events and is consequently a book I would definitely recommend.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Orwell’s less well known novels; it is a rather bleak comic novel written and set in 1938/1939. It is a well written novel about nostalgia, the lower middle classes, relationships between men and women and middle age. Orwell is primarily a political writer and as he said himself, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Given works like 1984 and Animal Farm, it isn’t surprising that this one can be forgotten.
Coming up for Air is narrated by George Bowling; a man living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, in his late 40s and in an unexciting but stable white collar job. Orwell has always created his male leads with a strong sense of inadequate masculinity; some self-awareness, many and obvious faults. In terms of plot, at the beginning of the book George is bemoaning his lot, his wife, job and life. We then have the nostalgia where he recalls his childhood pre 1914 in the Edwardian era in a town called Lower Binfield. Later in the book George takes some holiday and without telling his wife goes back to Lower Binfield after a gap of 25 years to search for his past, which, of course, has disappeared. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Some people have found George Bowling endearing; he isn’t. Orwell draws his caricature sharply. He is human, not a grotesque. But consider the point where George is laid on his bed and considering how women let themselves go after marriage; conning men to get to the altar and then suddenly rushing into middle age and dowdiness. This is from a man who is 45, fat, has false teeth and bad skin and wears vulgar clothes. Orwell is laying on the irony with a trowel. Late in the book George sees an old girlfriend from nearly 30 years previously. She has changed greatly and he barely recognises her (he inwardly reflects that she has aged badly without making the jump that she has not recognised him). George does have moments of clarity when he almost grasps how ridiculous he is, but not quite.
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.
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.
Ever in the background is the threat of war; by this time war with Hitler was seen as inevitable and there is a sense of impending doom. George is aware that a good deal of what is around him will be destroyed, as the 1914-1918 war swept away the world of his childhood. Orwell also lets his own political feelings slip in occasionally and his description of a New Left Book Club meeting is very well drawn.
It is a good read and has a deep vein of humour in the face of coming destruction. Not Orwell at his best, but certainly a different aspect of his work.

[Metodi Markov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Превъзходен Оруел!

Много приятна изненада се оказа този кратък негов роман.

И аз, както вероятно и много други читатели свързвам името на писателя предимно с късните му антиутопии, донесли му ноторна известност и до днес. След прочита на тази книга, започнах истински да жаля, че ни е напуснал толкова млад, без да успее да ни даде повече от чудесната си проза.

"Още въздух" е точен портрет на една безвъзвратно останала в миналото Англия, на изгубената невинност от преди Голямата война, носталгия към едно идилично детство, което авторът вероятно не е живял. Преди едва стотина години, в Темза още са плували едри пъстърви...

Достави ми голямо удоволствие, чете се леко и плавно, а житието на Джордж Боулинг трогва дълбоко. Защото промените го удрят по-фундаментално отколкото си дава сметка той и страховете от прогреса и от неминуемата война не го напускат нито за миг. Трябва му просто още глътка въздух...

Цитат:

"Преди войната винаги е лято..."

P.S. Испанската авантюра на Оруел го е наранила дълбоко, но несъмнено му е помогнала да прозре през плътното було на червената зараза. Самият факт, че приравнява Сталин на Хитлер още преди 1939 година е значим и много показателен за идейното му израстване през тези няколко предвоенни години.

[Sawsan · Rating 3 out of 5]

نزهة" عنوان لترجمة نُشرت عام 1969 لرواية جورج أورويل
Coming up for air
نظرة الانسان للماضي وقدرته على تذكُر ملامح الأماكن والأشخاص في حياته
رجل في منتصف العمر يحكي ذكرياته في بلدة انجليزية في بداية القرن العشرين
حياته الهادئة ومتعه البسيطة في عالم ما قبل الحرب العالمية الأولى
وبعد سنين في زيارة لبلدته يكتشف ان صور الحياة التي يحن إليها أصبح لا وجود لها
سرد جميل وبسيط وفيه خفة ظل وواقعية, ومناهضة واضحة للحروب وآثارها

[Margarita Garova · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Най-добре помня рибите, които не съм хванал. Мисля, че това е нормално.”

От всички цитати, които си извадих от “Глътка въздух”, мисля че този най-добре обобщава духа на книгата – миналото не може да се върне и в това се крие очарованието му, както ще разбере по трудния начин и Джордж Боулинг, четиресет и пет годишен застрахователен агент, съпруг и баща на две деца.

Социално, интелектуално и морално Джордж се самоопределя като средняк – не мизерства, но и не живее охолно; обича книгите, без да е интелектуалец; понякога престъпва брачните обети, но не е и негодник. Новата му зъбна протеза е повод за житейска равносметка, завръщане в детството, когато не знаеш, че мечтите ти са невъзможни или пък житейският ти хоризонт се свежда до риболов с приятели идната неделя.

Времето отпреди 1914 г. не е само това на отлетялата младост, но и съвсем различен от сегашния свят – скотски и страдалчески, но някак си успокояващо неизменен, устойчив и предвидим. Свят, в който всичко си е на мястото или по скоро, всеки си е на мястото. В езерцата има риби, а не консервни кутии. Дребният занаятчия все още не е погълнат от хищна верига. Брадвата тепърва ще посегне на буковите горички, бъдещи еднотипни жилища.

Настоящето е съдбовната 1939 г. Джордж крачи по пренаселените лондонски улици, а въздухът мирише на война. Над главите на минувачите прелитат бомбардировачи. Семейният живот е угнетяващ. Съвсем сигурно е, че бъдещето няма да е по-добро.

Насред нещо като екзистенциална безизходица Боулинг решава да слезе от лондонската въртележка и предприема пътуване до родния край, неговият начин да поеме глътка въздух. Дали двадесет години могат да променят едно място до неузнаваемост? Или изгубеният рай все още си стои на мястото?

Въпреки че по всички правила на канона, героят е анти-герой и сам, многократно, подчертава физическата си непривлекателност и неудачи – нито килограмите, нито изкуственото чене или евтиният костюм не са в състояние да отблъснат читателя. Джордж е много готин, така както са готини хората, които са наясно с недостатъците си, приели са ги и живеят някъде между компромиса и романтиката. Диалогизира с читателя през цялото време и последният не се съмнява в неговата искреност, нито в това, че такъв човек наистина е съществувал и съществува.

Казват, че книгите те откривали в подходящия момент. Е, аз си мисля, че това е рядък пример за книга, която, когато и да я прочетеш, все ще ти хареса. По оруелски цинична, но с поетичност, която не съм срещала до този момент в други негови книги. Въпреки пророческите опасения за бъдещето, “Глътка въздух” е пълна с ведрина и желание за живот отвъд ежедневната сивота, за стремеж към нещо “различно”, който всеки от нас, затрупен от битови грижи, изпитва, дори когато не може да му даде ясен словесен израз.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrated by George Bowling, a man in his late 40s, living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, with an unexciting but stable white collar job, this is a book of reminiscences and a nostalgic look back over his life. Overweight, and with false teeth,George is a first world war veteran, now working in insurance, travelling regularly in an escape from his wife and children.

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.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets, waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and apple jam under my care. I just entered 'nil' against everything and sent the form back. Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending out more forms, and filing those, and so on.

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.

So this is not a high octane, thrill a minute book. In fact, very little happens, it is largely an internal monologue, and few people bother to interact with George very much. It is however well written, and descriptive in a depressingly British sort of a way. Worth a read to calm down between exciting books maybe? 4 stars because it was an enjoyable read, but only in a 'nothing-much-happens' kind of way.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air



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.

I think John Wain was right when he said, "What makes _Coming Up For Air_ so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more."

This is a pessimistic novel that deals with sevearl paired themes:
- nostalgia for the past vs fear of the future
- memory vs truth
- memento mori vs inevitable change
- the individual/internal vs the universal/external
- liberty vs loss
- poverty vs wealth

As with Orwell's other work, 'Coming Up for Air' has some amazing prose and is definitely worth the effort.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time.”

They do say you should never go back, don’t they. Yet we all do this in our minds to some extent, and sometimes we do it quite literally. Perhaps you have done this; revisited somewhere from your childhood, or from an earlier time in your life. Perhaps you have visited an old house where you used to live; an old workplace, or an old school you used to attend. Perhaps you have met friends you hadn’t seen for years, or at last gone somewhere which had only ever been a pipedream, but you felt would be familiar. Have you done any, or all of these? I know I have.

Somehow the reality never lives up to the memory. Places from childhood are always smaller and shabbier than imagined. You wonder just why you got on with those folks so well, as you are now all stumbling to find something to say. The holiday destination you dreamed of years ago looks nothing like the pictures in your mind. Yet you still feel a strange kind of ownership over somewhere that used to mean a lot to you, and a sense of loss. Something has drifted away without you noticing.

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:

“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.”

A year seems an age to a four year old, but seems mere weeks to a 44 year old, and passes in the flicker of an eye, for an 84 year old.

Coming up for Air is then, primarily a novel steeped in nostalgia. Its hero is George Bowling, a 45 year-old middle-class insurance salesman. He is married to Hilda, who at 39 is: “very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes” according to George. Her family belong to the poverty-stricken officer class of an Anglo-Indian family, but after their marriage she has settled into being a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. They have two kids: Billy who is 7, and Lorna who is 11, and a house in the suburbs. A nondescript house in West Bletchley, to be exact, on a mortgage. It is not a council house, but could just as well be, George thinks thinks sourly, because it is identical to all the “long long rows of little semi-detached houses” which surround it. We don’t hear much about the kids, except in odd asides, as being bothersome encumbrances. George Bowling feels vaguely dissatisfied with his life overall; feels that he needs to “come up for air”. He is opinionated, intolerant, judgemental, both frustrated with his lot and oddly resigned to it. He has a vague itch to do something about this, but usually settles back into the humdrum routine.

“It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working—hair goes on growing for years, for instance. 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. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”

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 …

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:

“The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”

Domestic comedy then, we nod sagely, and enjoy being appalled and sometimes uncomfortably identifying with George Bowling’s private thoughts about his daily life. We feel very much that George Bowling has a chip on his shoulder. He comes across as embittered, sardonic, and sometimes quite obnoxious. George Bowling is such a pompous little prig of a man. The beginning is blackly, excruciatingly funny, as he expresses his frustration about his daily slog. To me, it all sounded eerily familiar, yet this was before I was born. Then it hit me.

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.

George Bowling begins to remind himself of how good things used to be as a child. There is a overwhelming sense of longing; a grasp for something out of reach; a straining to recapture some of that lost idyllic time. And we find now that we are reading a completely different sort of book from that first hilarious section.

Gone is the side-splitting humour, as we find ourselves immersed in George Bowling’s childhood. This is a world of innocence, and of vivid sights and smells; of boyhood, family life and rambling in the country. We read about George and his older brother, living in their parents’ shop in “Lower Binfield” near the River Thames. It is a seed merchant’s, but selling sundry items too, and has a peculiar dusty smell. Such shops were rapidly becoming outmoded, and going downhill. It saddens George to think of his father, working so hard at a soul-destroying business and barely keeping his head above water:

“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.”

We can almost smell the grass and nature on a summer’s day while fishing, and the sweet aroma of the candy George and his friends loved to buy. This is a lovingly detailed picture of a world long gone; of a world which was disappearing by the time George Bowling was sharing his recollections, in 1938. This second part is a lengthy exposition which feels so authentic and drawn from life, that once more we wonder about the two Georges. How did George Orwell, famous for his keen eye and exceptional journalism, come to write such a different piece? For this, we need to look at his life up to that point.

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.

“And it’s a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of a strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with breaking rules and killing things.”

This section may meander along, losing some of its momentum compared with the farcical first section, but we become steeped in the natural environment and sensations of young George, which is also young Eric’s world. Why did he want to recapture this, and set it on record? At this period George Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious literary criticism. The key to this question is in the year.

Coming Up for Air was written between 1938 and 1939, while George Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. There was much anxiety about the impeding war—i.e. the Second World War—which was expected to start in about 1941. Everyone was uncertain about the future; facing the unknown, and fearing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats. They feared the loss of everything they had known and held dear. What better time to think back and console yourself with early memories.

In part 3 we learn about George Bowling’s experience in the previous war, World War I. 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. This brings back memories of the Great War to George, and makes him think about the pain and futility of war. In fact George Bowling’s war experience had been typically farcical. A clerical error during the First World War had landed him in charge of a virtually nonexistent supply unit, a comfortable sinecure well away from any action. It provided contacts which helped him to become a successful salesman.

His namesake, the author had been too young to fight in World War I, but had fought in Catalonia, in the Spanish civil war, initially for the Republican army, although the politics became very complicated. His book “Homage to Catalonia” records this time. It was there that he received the wound from which he was recuperating at the time of writing this novel. Standing against the trench parapet at 6 ft 2 in., he was an easy target, and wounded in the throat by a sniper’s bullet. At the outbreak of the Second World War, George Orwell applied for war work, but said: “They won’t have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs”. That was a mere few months after the close of this novel.

If you have read the book’s blurb, you will know what the fourth part is about, as it tells you in the second sentence! I will conceal it though. George Bowling has won a modest sum of money in a horse race, which he has not told his family about. He decides to use the money on a “trip down memory lane”, to revisit the old haunts of his childhood. He recalls from thirty years ago, a particular pond with huge fish in it, which he had missed the chance to fish. He makes careful plans to return to Lower Binfield, but when he arrives he is shocked to find the place virtually unrecognisable. Eventually he locates the old pub where he is to stay, but it is much changed. Only the church and vicar appear the same. His home has become a tea shop, and he is devastated to see that his old girlfriend has been so ravaged by time, that she is almost unrecognisable and is utterly devoid of the qualities he once adored. Ruefully he observes that she does not recognise him at all.

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.

We have tension between nostalgia and progress, and the imminent slaughter of millions. Running alongside George’s inner disbelief, but eventual resigned acceptance, is writing which captures the very real pre-war anxiety. It is clear that everyone was feeling a sort of quiet desperation about the upcoming and inevitable war. George Bowling describes the blinkered view of some people, and we can see his own way of coping too; a deliberately sardonic view, using shock tactics to make quite a few grisly and distasteful comments. His descriptions were no mere black humour, but to come to pass, and feel almost unbearably poignant. Written in 1938 and published in 1939, in real life it was only to be a matter of months before war was declared. The characters themselves expected more time; the rumours were that the war would start in 1941. This lack of awareness that the war was imminent and would begin in November 1939 did not just apply to the protagonist, it was also true for the author, for whom it was a mere 3 months away.

In this final section George Bowling remembers the slow decline of his father’s seed business, mainly because a large attractive store belonging to a successful chain had opened nearby. George’s father had no idea why his business was failing, when he had always managed to break even before, but he died before he was made bankrupt. This painful memory has made George particularly sensitive and resistant to what he sees as the marching ravages of so-called “progress”.

“That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.”

His final disappointment is when he finds that the estate where he used to fish, has been built over, and the secluded and the secret pond which contained the huge carp he always intended to fish for until war intervened, has become a rubbish dump. He realises that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years. Forcibly brought back to the reality of the here and now, the social and material changes make George Bowling’s precious childhood experiences seem impossibly distant.

An episode near the end recalls the farce of the opening section, when an English bomb accidentally lands on the town of Lower Binfield. There is a bitter irony in that the factory making nylon stockings would also be making missiles. George Bowling decides that it is time to return home, disillusioned with what he has found. Even his attempt at a flirtation with a woman in the hotel falls flat, and he realises that he does not look like a prosperous businessman after all. He was deceiving himself in everything. He would go home to Hilda.

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.

Coming Up for Air is an extraordinary novel. I would not say it is extraordinarily good, although some part do excel, and George Orwell’s writing is as lucid, witty and entertaining as ever. The present day sections pre-war are peppered with hilariously ridiculous rumours, which are funny in a ghastly way. Nevertheless they have the flavour of authenticity, such as recommending sitting in the bath until it’s all over, or saying that if you hide under the table you will be safe. There are also satisfying literary devices, such as whenever there is a big change in George Bowling’s life, the bombers have flown overhead, as a sort of portent.

“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.”

However, it doesn’t quite reach 5 stars for me, as it has faults. The structure is odd and unbalanced. The second section is packed full of nostalgic descriptions, but as part of a novel this is overlong and rather self-indulgent. We also veer wildly beween the different moods. However, each part is good on its own terms, and sometimes exceptional. It feels unique, set in those few months before the Second World War broke out.

George Orwell was about 36 when Coming Up for Air was published. In a way it seems strange that he was to develop from this black comedy to write such savage indictments of totalitarianism, disguised in the novel form, especially perhaps when his natural bent was journalism. However, looking closely, we can see that George Orwell is exploring many similar themes to those he was to develop in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The idea of a protagonist being bound by rules, attempting to escape, but being eventually defeated by circumstances, was to reach a devastating peak in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

George Orwell’s political affiliations varied throughout his life and his views were complex. However in Coming Up for Air he shows a paradoxically conservative strain. He uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man, to examine the decency of a past England and to express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. This book is imbued with George Orwell’s deep love of British traditions, much as we find in his essays “A Nice Cup of Tea” or “In Defence of English Cooking”. It also has some beautiful lyrical and evocative passages. His abiding love of nature and the English countryside is as apparent here as it is in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”.

At heart, this is a story written by a proud, articulate Englishman, who loves village pubs, tea rooms, cricket, the countryside, and feels that if everything is falling down around him, it can all be put right by a spot of fishing.

[Araz Goran · Rating 4 out of 5]

ما دمره الحرب، تعيده الذكريات ..

إجترار الذكريات هو الشيء الوحيد الذي يفعله إنسان لا يمتلك أي حياة، أقصد أنه لا يملك حياة حقيقية، لا أهداف عليا، موظف أربعيني يعيش حياته منزوية مع زوجته المملة وعمله الأكثر مللاً، لا يتطلع لشيء سوى الخروج من دوامة الملل الحياة الروتينية ، الحرب على وشك الحدوث، يشتاق لقريته الصغيرة، يحاول العودة نحو الذكريات البعيدة بزيارة القرية، لكن ماذا يمكن أن يجد هنالك، كل شيء تغير إلا هو، حياته لم تكن سوى سراب، كان يركض بزهو من دون أن يشعر بمرور كل ذلك الوقت وكل ذلك التغيير ، مع التذكير أن الحرب على وشك الحدوث، هنا اللحظات الأخيرة ماقبل الحرب ..


أعود إلى قراءة " حكايات الذاكرة " ، الحكاية المتعلقة بإنسان واحد وبمصير واحد وذكريات واحدة، ذلك الشخص الذي يسرد على نفسه قبل الآخرين حكياته الملئية بالإعترافات الشخصية، الخوف، القلق، الإنتظار، البحث عن المعنى، الروايات التي تقتات على الذاكرة ويعيش القاريء من خلالها حكاية شخص لا يعرفه، حكاية تتكرر بإستمرار وبملل أحياناً ..


أسلوب أورويل ساحر في السرد ، مرتب وأنيق على نحو ما هو أنجليزي، ساخر وحاد ومحبط أحياناً، لا يترك للقاريء مجالاً واضحاً للملل، حتى لو كان نوع الحكي الذي لا يهمك، سيجبرك على الإصغاء وفتح ذاكرتك أيضاً ربما قد عشت أشياء مشابه، من يعلم؟
أورويل يصنع اللحظة ويجسد الحدث ويلهو بالذاكرة، شخصياته واضحة وبسيطة وواقعية لا تعكس سوى مصير الإنسان وحياته وقلقه في مجتمعات مابعد الحرب والخوف من الحرب القادمة ..


ربما تبدو الرواية للبعض مملة، ولكن ما جذبني فيها هو نبرة الصدق في الحكي، أورويل يجعلك تصدق مايرويه لك وكأنه قد عاشه بكل تفاصيله ، لذلك أحببت الرواية، أحببتها جداً ..

[Firdevs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orwell'in mizah anlayışına ve insanları eleştirme tarzına hayran kalmamak imkansız!

"Hepimizi satın almışlar, hem de kendi paramızla."
sayfa 21

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Orwell had ever divided his books between "entertainments" and serious works, as Graham Greene did, I assume he would have classified Coming Up for Air (1939) as the former, but it's still a fascinating window into the pre-war anxiety experienced by ordinary people in England. When George Bowling finds himself glancing worriedly at the sky on his way to work, his thoughts seem to be picking up directly from Orwell's previous book, Homage to Catalonia, which ends with Orwell contemplating "the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."

Ultimately this is a story about running away, or at least the desire to run away, and it includes some of Orwell's best comic writing. There's a particularly inspired moment when George, in the process of trying to escape for the weekend without letting anyone know, glances at the road behind him and imagines everyone in his life in hot pursuit, including Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle: "There's the chap who's trying to get away! After him!"

Some readers might find it surprising that Orwell had a bit of sympathy for the chap trying to get away. Orwell was a man, after all, who in his late 30s volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War when he didn't have to, who seemingly couldn't conceive of an individual life without a certain responsibility to civilization as whole- a man I find morally admirable but for the same reason intimidating. But there's nevertheless some additional evidence of this sympathy in "Inside the Whale", Orwell's critical but not unsympathetic essay about Henry Miller- ostensibly a review of Tropic of Cancer, it turns into a reflection on Miller's worldview:

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work.

The desire to get inside the whale- or to admit that you are already inside it, as Orwell refuses to condemn Miller for admitting- was understandable then, and it's understandable now. Who wants to think about this effing Coronavirus? Who wants to think about the warming of the planet, the concentration camps in China, and all the things that we don't seem to have any control over as individuals?

In another chapter that I remember somewhat vividly from this novel, George reminisces about getting to spend a few months alone on an island, at some strange care-taking job, just sitting alone, reading and thinking. Coming up for air, you might say. Life might offer a peaceful interregnum here or there, Orwell suggests, but there's also an awareness throughout his work that the world will not simply allow us to go into hiding and read books. Not for long, anyway.

Maybe what draws you back, finally, is your own sense of responsibility as a human being, an understanding that the world's problems are your problems. That if I see other people suffering, that has something to do with me. I can accept the lie that I just worked harder than they did, that I "deserve" what I have that others don't, and that's certainly more pleasant, or I can remind myself day in and day out that things are really fucked up. That I make this choice every day is something that Bernie Sanders's campaign for president, win or lose, has made me more conscious of, and something that Orwell's writing insists upon as well. The world won't simply leave us to our self-involved pleasures. And maybe that's as it should be.

[Nigeyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton and that kickstarted a whole fascination with English literature set in or around London c1939. In addition to Hangover Square, particular recent highlights include...

London Belongs to Me
The Slaves of Solitude
Of Love And Hunger

...it's a rich vein that I continue to mine.

'Coming Up For Air' was my first George Orwell since 'Homage to Catalonia' a few years back (whilst preoccupied with books about the Spanish Civil War). I'd also read '1984' and 'Animal Farm' when I was a teenager.

This book is another great slice of pre-WW2 English literature. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It evokes the era perfectly. The book is split into four parts. The second part is full of childhood reminiscences from the early twentieth century. The protagonist recalls his childhood from the perspective of the late 1930s. This section reminded me very much of 'Cider with Rosie' (one of my favourite books), with the key difference that this is fiction. It made me wonder how Orwell managed to so credibly know, and be able to relate, a childhood in a small rural community. Either way it's a stunning section, and also very cleverly manages to highlight some of the seismic changes that took place for the average person in the UK throughout the twentieth century.

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.

The book also contains some hints at what was to come with 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' which Orwell would write a few years later - specifically musings on an "after-war" dystopian future characterised by hate, slogans, secret cells etc. Remarkably prescient and demonstrating he was already thinking about some of the themes that were later developed so memorably in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

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.

5/5

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming Up for Air is the internal monologue of unhappily married insurance salesman George Bowling, forty-five, fat, and equipped with new false teeth. It is perhaps less a novel and more a fictionalised essay. Bowling is not an entirely convincing character because he keeps reminding you of George Orwell. Or, if you prefer, he is entirely convincing because he is so obviously not a character at all - just Eric Blair hiding in plain sight. A thin man pretending to be a fat man. An Old Etonian pretending to be a grammar school boy. In addition to his first name Bowling shares many of Orwell’s tastes and opinions: his hatred of the chromium-plated modern world, with such horrors as tinned food and the radio always blaring, and his unsentimental love of nature. He also shares Orwell’s artfully achieved plain-speaking prose style familiar from the essays. Bowling is from the shopkeeping class but has married into a family of British Empire administrators remarkably like Orwell’s own. He frequently exhibits such a detached sociological overview of his own circumstances (suburbia is ‘a prison with the cells all in a row’) that you are left wondering why he became an insurance salesman in the first place: he clearly should have been a social and political essayist.

Orwell wrote the book in Morocco in 1938-1939. He was suffering from tuberculosis and also recuperating from his injuries in the Spanish Civil War. Although never mentioned, his horrifying experiences in Spain in 1937 seem to lie behind it. Being shot through the throat by a facist bullet while fighting fascists is one thing, but fleeing for your life from what was supposed to be your own side is something else entirely. This is Orwell brooding on recent events, looking fretfully towards the future, and seeking reassurance and continuity in his Oxfordshire childhood. It is far from coincidental that it is also a homage of sorts to Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, as H. G. Wells was one of his favourite writers as a child.

The shadow of war in Europe hangs heavily over Coming Up for Air. Bowling knows war is on its way and, having fought in the Great War, is against it, as Orwell himself was at the time. He is frightened by the coming conflict and a world that sounds very much like 1984 -:

‘The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it - or at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape.’

Bowling, however, does find a means of escape: into the past. His recollections of his Edwardian childhood in the (fictional) Oxfordshire village of Lower Binfield, before the horrors of a war which changed everything forever, form the heart of the novel. It’s evocative and aromatic stuff: Penny Monsters, Paradise Mixture, fizzy lemonade, sugar mice and sugar pigs, dusty roads, endless summer days and still summer evenings, hooting owls and nightjars and cockchafers, the stone floor of his mother’s kitchen and the blackleaded range, chestnut trees and country lanes, the smell of fennel, white peppermint, ground coffee, pipe-tobacco, and the rubbish dump. And fishing, lots of fishing. But Bowling doesn’t evade the brutalities of childhood, a great deal of his communing with nature involved killing wildlife. Eventually he decides to make a return trip to Lower Binfield for old times sake. When he gets there he finds the present has caught up with it. It has been urbanised, distended, and made ugly with housing estates. The house he was brought up in has been turned into a particularly tacky tea shop. And no one recognises him. Not even his childhood sweetheart, herself now so ground down by life that she is almost unrecognisable.

Coming Up for Air has sometimes been described as simply an exercise in nostalgia. It’s certainly much more than that. As usual Orwell’s straightforward prose style masks a complex and slippery set of ideas. I used to think it was a warning about how nostalgia blinds one to the dangers of the present; rereading it I wasn’t so sure. It might be about how nostalgia can help one deal with the present. What is striking is that running through Bowling’s reminiscences is a vein of ambivalence so deep that it amounts to what Orwell, in 1984, would call doublethink: the ability to simultaneously accept two contradictory ideas as true. He alternates between acknowledging that his rose-tinted view of his childhood is a ‘delusion’ and insisting on its truth. But then memory can be both factually false and emotionally true. For Bowling, and surely for Orwell also, nostalgia for his childhood is a sort of lifeline or private mythology, a way of preserving an image of the world that represents values that are important to him, values he feels have been lost in modern society, and which enable him to retain his humanity and sanity in an increasingly inhuman and insane world. Despite his disastrous holiday in Lower Binfield one feels that his affectionate attachment to his past as a way of understanding the present will survive.

In his 1940 essay Inside the Whale, which begins as an appreciation of Henry Miller before turning into an analysis of English literature since World War 1, Orwell argued that good novels were now more likely to be written from a ‘passive’ or ‘quietist’ perspective rather than an overtly political one-:

‘Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it….Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt’.

Coming Up for Air is very much that kind of novel. Bowling, even if he does feel more like a projection of certain aspects of Orwell’s thought and experience than an actual character, is emphatically inside the whale; a man on the sidelines of history. He recognises that he is powerless to change the course of events and doesn’t really have any great desire to do so. He thinks that, whatever happens, life will always continue pretty much unaltered for ordinary unpolitical lower-middling chaps like himself.

The vision of life presented in this book is ultimately bleak: politics is reduced to two rival yet interchangeable groups of hate-filled gangsters, marriage is a trap, the present is a struggle, and the future is a nightmare. It is also highly readable, consistently interesting, sometimes intoxicatingly lyrical, and shot through with sardonic humour. In many ways it is a key Orwell text, peppered with themes also found in the essays, and transfigured scenes from his childhood, as well as prefiguring the dystopian worlds of Animal Farm and 1984.

[Alice Poon · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with Orwell’s other books, I loved his endearing trademark of dry wit and humor in his powerful storytelling. This novel would probably resonate with anyone who has ever experienced an urge for an escapist indulgence. I would have given this book five stars had it not been for the description of wicked little boys killing baby birds for fun.

This is a story about a middle-aged man trying to find an escape from boredom, fear and anxieties about aging, impending disaster and existence in general. In modern day term: mid-life crisis. He lives in England with his family in a working-class suburban home and has a mundane job as an insurance salesman. The timeline is the interim period between the two world wars. He hopes to find a little relief from the daily pressures of living by re-visiting his childhood town in the countryside, of which he retains fond memories. Is he successful? You can probably guess.

[P.S. Above all, this novel is a sobering reminder of the horrors of war.]

[huzeyfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Açıkçası bu kitap kütüphanemde aylardır bekliyordu. Bir iki defa elimde gezdirdim ama tam anlamıyla canım istemediği için bıraktım. Neden sonra bir iştahla bu kitabı aradım rafların arasında ve elime almam ile bitirmem bir oldu demek isterdim ama araya hastalık girdiği için birkaç gün ertelendi kitabın bitişi ve bu inceleme yazısı.

Öncelikle şunu söylemek istiyorum. Kitabın büyük bir kısmında adı geçen Binfield kasabasına yaklaşIk 7-8 mil uzaklıkta oturuyorum ve oraya birçok kez gitmişliğim var. Bu kitapta adı geçen yerlerinin tamamını olmasa da tamamına yakınını gözüm kapalı zinhimde adresleyebildiğim için bu kitabı okumak daha büyük bir keyif vermiş olabilir. Çünkü yaklaşIk 7 yılımı geçirdiğim bu muhitin yüz yıl önceki halinin resmedilmesi beni inanılmaz mutlu etti.

Kitabı çok sevmemin bir diğer büyük sebebi de tabii ki George Orwell'in müthiş İngiliz ironisi ile bezediği anlatım. 1984'te daha çok karamsar ve iç karartıcı bir hava hakim iken burada son derece eğlenceli bir dil hakim. Bazı yerlerdeki anlatıma hayran kaldım diyebilirim. Mesela, İngiltere'de yaşayanlar bilirler, Mart ayında yalancı bir yaz havası ortaya çıkar ve hava birkaç günlüğüne inanılmaz güzel ve sıcak geçer. Hani Türkiye'de pastırma yazı kavramı vardır ya... Aynı ona benzer bir dönem. Onu bakın ne güzel ifade etmiş:

"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.

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.

Bir de tabii ki George Orwell'in sürekli savaş karşıtı söylemleri ve inceden inceye kimi zaman da bariz bir şekilde anti militarist ve anti kapitalist tiratları kitaba hoş bir lezzet katmış.

George Orwell'i tanımak için, tanıdıysanız daha da bir sevmek için müthiş bir kitap.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t really know what to expect when I picked up “Coming Up for Air”. I knew it wouldn’t be the scathing allegory that is “Animal Farm” and I knew it wouldn’t be the terrifying dystopia of “1984”. I wasn’t sure what Orwell would do with the story of a middle-aged man who is frustrated with his empty suburban life, as the world moves inexorably towards World War II. I think I had forgotten how beautiful his prose was, and how he had this uncanny inability to capture feelings and thoughts and put them on the page. The depths of nostalgia, regrets and longing the unpleasant and vulgar George Bowling goes through in those 250 pages makes you forget his paunch, his receding hairline and his insufferable wife. Under the skin, we are not that different, no matter what we might think.

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.

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.

At some point, he reflects that his father would have thought of his cheap house as a great luxury, what with the bathroom indoors and everything! Life in the Edwardian and Victorian era was often short, brutal, dirty – and people had a very different benchmark with which to judge whether or not they had a good life. Those standards all went right out of the window when the country towns died and the suburbia began sprawling. Soldiers back from the war did not go back to the family business, they began looking for work in the city and a home not too far from work. And as George sees another war creep up over the horizon, he knows the world is in for another abrupt change, and yearns for a time when things were simple and steady, and fear was not always at the back of his mind. He tries to reconnect with his past, but what he finds is not at all what he remembered...

A bittersweet, sad, funny, gorgeously written novel that made me admire Mr. Orwell even more than I did. In this book, he captures nostalgia and resignation with more finesse and skill than anyone else I have ever read.

[Em Memória de Fátima Linhares · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se tivesse um espelho, olhava-me de alto a baixo, embora já soubesse como era: um homem gordo e quarentão, com fato cinzento de tweed um tanto surrado e chapéu de coco. Mulher, dois filhos e casa nos subúrbios, tudo escarrapachado na cara. Cara vermelhusca e olhos azuis embaciados. Já sei, não é preciso dizerem-mo. Mas apercebi-me de repente, ao olhar para a dentadura antes de a voltar a pôr na boca, que não faz diferença. Até os dentes postiços não fazem diferença. Sou gordo, é verdade. Pareço o irmão pindérico de um corretor de apostas, é verdade. Mulher nenhuma vai para a cama comigo a não ser que lhe pague. Estou consciente disto tudo. Mas estou-me nas tintas, digo-vos eu. Não quero mulheres, nem sequer quero ser jovem outra vez. Só quero estar vivo. E sentia-me vivo naquele momento, a olhar para as prímulas e as brasas cor de fogo junto à sebe. É algo que se sente cá dentro, uma sensação de paz que é ao mesmo tempo como uma chama.

Nunca tinha lido nada do Senhor Orwell, mas posso dizer que esta primeira incursão na sua obra foi excelente. Logo nas primeiras páginas gostei da sinceridade e até de um certo humor do protagonista, George Bowling. Um homem inglês comum, sem nada de extraordinário, com uma vida perfeitamente banal e sem nenhum momento de excitação. Acontece-lhe algo de excecional ao longo do livro? Não, não acontece, mas mesmo assim o interesse em ler mantém-se, pois, além de gostar do protagonista/narrador, a escrita do autor agarrou-me.

Entretanto comecei a ler 1984. Não sei se vou apreciar, pois distopias não fazem muito o meu género. Vamos ver.

Leitura conjunta com a suspeita do costume, Cristina.

[Meaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first had a look at this, I wondered if it was really by the same George Orwell. It certainly didn't seem to be anything like 1984 or Animal Farm. But it was indeed he. I spent most of the book wondering if anything was actually going to happen in this story. And nothing really did. I hated it at first, but for some reason I kept coming back to it. It grew on me.

The protagonist, a fat and rather unlikeable father of two named George Bowling, leads a rather boring middle-class existence in the mid-1930s. He sells insurance. He lives in a suburban house. He doesn't love his wife anymore and he doesn't really like his children. The impetus for the plot is that George won seventeen pounds in a horse race and decides to keep it a secret from his family and go on a secret trip back to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up. Another good title for the book might have been You Can't Go Home Again, but Thomas Wolfe had already taken it. When George returns to Lower Binfield, he doesn't even recognize it.

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.

I would recommend this books to scholars of modern English literature and also turn-of-the-century England.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

I can’t help but draw parallels between Orwell’s comedic take on bad marriage [Coming Up For Air] and Tolstoy’s dramatic take on bad marriage [The Kreutzer Sonata]—the difference being that Orwell’s character blissfully daydreams about the death of his wife (thus the comedy) and Tolstoy’s character actually murders his wife (thus the drama). Is each man questioning the whole institution of matrimony with similar conclusions? Or is it just me? After all, I have personally been twice married and twice divorced. Maybe I’m projecting? …

Back on topic—I enjoyed this offbeat foray into humor. This may not be the Orwell we all know and love but it’s still an entertaining and thought provoking stab at old guard bureaucracy. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Released in 1939, Coming Up for Air is perhaps the final kiss-of-death to pre-war life in miserable old England, and the first ready-for-war book to soberly embrace the next six agonising years. The protagonist George is a First World War veteran whose life has settled into the predetermined routine of people of his class and age—a travelling insurance position, a nagging harridan of a missus, and two kids too many. After kvetching about his sorry lot in Part One, he recalls his childhood in Part Two, nostalgic for the privations of his working-class boyhood—somehow they’re better than the privations of his lower-middle-class adulthood—and takes a trip to his youth in the later parts, where everything has slowly modernised and the fishing pond has been tarmacked to make way for an asylum. The novel is written in the first-person, making it hard to discern Orwell’s intentions—is he satirising this look-back bore, or sympathising with the lack of free-will in his life? Probably both. A darkly funny if mainly miserable book about the people who lived lives of quiet despair so we could access Goodreads on our iPhones.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

45th book of 2021. Artist for this review is English painter Julian Trevelyan.

3.5. A very English novel, as expected from Orwell. I've been meaning to read his earlier works for a long time now, having only read 1984 and Animal Farm previously, and a great load of his non-fiction. Like Huxley, I suppose, he is most known for his dystopian novel, though really, his early novels are very different. John Carey says that those aforementioned novels of Orwell's are "here in embryo", and I was surprised by how true it is; they really are. Conversely, Huxley's 20s satires are almost unrecognisable from his later Brave New World. This is a real pre-war novel and I was wondering throughout what Orwell was attempting with it, an anti-war piece? A satire? A political piece? Attack on industry? The novel's protagonist (told in the first-person) is George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old fat insurance salesman who doesn't appear to like his wife or his children. But he does acquire a set of false teeth in the beginning of the novel, which sets off his nostalgia, as does a news-poster about King Zog of Albania.


"Tisbury"—1937

Part II of the novel is a long interlude from the present day (1939) that slips back to Bowling's English childhood, his parents, his school, his older brother and his friends and what they got up to together (stealing, killing birds, wandering, fishing). Orwell's writing is wonderfully well-written and there were charming elements to all this early stuff, sort of reminiscent of Laurie Lee's books, but not overly compelling. Bowling's memories move on towards 1914 and through the First World War, which I found far more interesting to read. Then his subsequent marriage, finding work, his job, etc., all the way to the present day again, where Bowling has a mini-epiphany and decides to take a week off and go back to his hometown. Thus Orwell describes the drive, the changes to the place, the woods, the buildings, Bowling's thoughts about the town now compared to then... Great writing, but not massively interesting again. However, as Carey suggests, those later and more impressive works (I consider 1984 one of the great novels from our country) are in embryo here. On the brink of another war, there are some fascinating sections—

War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That's to say, who's afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? 'You are,' you say. Yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen.

—Big Brother is right there lurking between those lines, alright.


"The Potteries"—1938

There's some wit throughout but not as much as I was hoping. Some good lines such as, and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always 'on tables', as though that made it worse), but mostly it was more serious than I had always imagined. On the whole, Orwell's non-fiction reigns supreme. His books Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia are both brilliant, and his essays are stellar too, Consider the Whale, for one. Orwell wrote this novel whilst recuperating from illness in French Morocco, and for the most part I simply see it as a filler novel, a stretching-of-legs, before writing those two brilliant novels that would end his career.

[Esma T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orwell sen ne muhteşem bir yazarsın! Kitabın daha ilk sayfalarında bu cümleyi kurduyor Orwell, en ünlü eserleri 1984 ve Hayvan Çiftliği olsa da (ki onları çok severim), geri planda kalan eserleri de onlar kadar iyiymiş bu kitapla bunu daha iyi anladım. Kitabı okudukça sevdim, sevdikçe okudum.

Belki insan asıl beyni durunca ölüyor, yeni bir düşünceyi idrak etme gücünü yitirince.

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.

Ben sadece yaşamak istiyorum. Ve şu çuhaçiçeklerine, çitin altındaki kızıl korlara balarken yaşıyordum. İçinizde duyarsınız bunu; huzur verici bir şeydir ama aynı zamanda alev gibidir.

Kısacası, hala Orwell okumadıysanız kaçırmayın derim.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Note on the Text

--Coming Up for Air

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! Like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and the octopuses. We're all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I'd found the way to the top. Back to Lower Binfield!

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.

George thinks back to his carefree boyhood in the village of Lower Binfield. There are long passages about the fun of fishing with his buddies, and the beauty of nature. He also reminisces about his love of reading, his first job, his first love, and his experiences in the Great War. While some of the descriptions of his boyhood are quite lyrical, they could have been edited down.

After attending a lecture by an anti-fascist and feeling fearful about another war, George has the need for the peace and happiness he enjoyed as a boy before the Great War. He had some money from betting on the horses, and used it to travel back to Lower Binfield. The rest of the book tells about his experiences going back home.

Orwell's love of nature, fishing, and reading comes through in the character he created. George Bowling is humorous, cynical, not always likable, and understandably worried about the future. Except for the overly long musings about George's childhood, "Coming Up for Air" is an entertaining and thoughtfully written novel.

[Майя Ставитская · Rating 4 out of 5]

The somewhat detached and sarcastic narrative manner that you expect from Orwell (and the first part of the novel is written in this way) is completely demolished by the fierce tenderness of the continuation. Starting with the second part, in which the hero-narrator recalls his childhood in the small town of Lower Binfield, the level of involvement in the text increases by an order of magnitude. It is a unique reader's impression when you experience such emotional swings within the framework of one book.

The writer's gloomy insight in anticipation of the Second World War is connected with the story of a philistine salesman: a henpecked husband, a father of two children, the son of a couple of small shopkeepers. Surprisingly, the full impression of the book is autofiction, despite the fact that there are no coincidences in the biography of the writer with the life realities of his hero at all.

George Bowling wants to return to the town of his childhood to take a breath of air - to relive the joys of fishing, which was his main hobby and the only true love.

Никогда не возвращайся в прежние места
А разве кто-нибудь, у кого голова на плечах, сомневается, что грядут скверные времена?
"Глотнуть воздуха" одновременно совсем оруэлловская и совершенно не характерная для него книга. Не то, чтобы я могла похвастаться хорошим знанием творчества писателя, знаю у него только "Скотный двор" и "1984". И не то, чтобы делала большую разницу между написанным от третьего и от первого лица. Обычно не делаю. Не в этом случае.

Потому что здесь несколько отстраненная и саркастичная повествовательная манера, которой ждешь от Оруэлла (и первая часть романа написана именно в такой), напрочь сносится яростной нежностью продолжения. Начиная со второй части, в которой герой-рассказчик вспоминает свое детство в маленьком городке Нижнем Бинфилде, уровень сопричастности тексту повышается на порядок. Уникальное читательское впечатление, когда в рамках одной книги переживаешь такие эмоциональные качели.

О чем книга? История обывателя, коммивояжера: мужа-подкаблучника, отца двоих детей, сына четы мелких лавочников. Ему подвалила нежданная удача, заодно с приятелем, сыграл на скачках и выиграл. Деньги не запредельные - примерный эквивалент двухнедельного заработка, но пришли дуриком и Джордж ощущает себя калифом-на-час: на что захочу, на то и потрачу.: могу враз с подружкой прокутить, могу потихоньку добавлять маленькие радости к повседневным А Хильде не отдам.

Слегка за сорок, толстоват, лицом красноват. Не красавец и не богач, как вы могли догадаться. Вот уже и зубной протез пришло время поставить. Но еще в силе. Питает сдержанную ненависть к соседям по таунхаусу и острую - к ипотечному банку, которому еще лет двадцать выплачивать за типовой домик. Сумел выбиться из верхнего слоя низшего класса в нижний - среднего, оценивает свои успехи трезво, особой гордости не питает. Боится войны.

Роман увидел свет в 1939 году, писался наверняка раньше, Оруэлл не из тех литераторов что выдают по две книжки в год: между "Глотком воздуха" и "Скотным двором" будет промежуток в шесть лет, от него до "1984" пройдет еще три год. Но мрачная проницательность писателя нашла отражение в предчувствии Второй Мировой - замечательно, что ее предположительное начало Оруэлл относит на 41-й год, ошибившись в части фактической даты, но точно назвав время вхождения военных действий в острую фазу. Ужасом перед грядущей войной пронизаны первая и четвертая часть рома��а - его опоясывающее "сегодня".

Вторая и третья части - рассказ о детстве и юности Боулинга. Удивительно, насколько полное впечатление автофикшна создает текст, при том, что совпадения в биографии писателя с жизненными реалиями его героя нулевые. В книге будет небольшой фрагмент о детстве Хильды, так вот - в нем Оруэлл рассказывает о своем. Но точные и четкие детали все время прослушивания не оставляли у меня сомнений - рассказывая о Боулинге, автор говорит о себе. Мне понадобилось прочесть реальную биографию Джорджа Оруэлла, чтобы убедиться, насколько отличается его жизненный путь от описанного в книге. И все-таки (шепотом) до конца не верю.

По зрелом размышлении, Джордж Боулинг решает на недельку вернуться в городок своего детства, чтобы заново пережить радости рыбалки, которая была его главным увлечением и единственной настоящей любовью Что из этого выйдет, не буду говорить, подержу интригу. Я рада, что роман появился в формате аудиокниги в превосходной начитке Игоря Князева. Здесь имеет смысл уточнить, на Литресе есть также аудиовариант в исполнении Александра Клюквина, и это тот случай, когда хочется сказать: "Дайте две!" Уточню только , что новая версия звучит на час дольше, выбирать вам.

Вы проживете придуманную жизнь так, словно это ваша личная история и удивитесь, насколько разным может быть Оруэлл

[Nood-Lesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dicono che le persone felici non hanno storia

Strana cosa, il passato. Ci accompagna tutto il giorno, credo che non passi ora senza che pensiamo a cose avvenute dieci o vent’anni prima; eppure per la maggior parte del tempo esso non possiede realtà, non è che una serie di fatti imparati, come un monte di chiacchiere erudite in un libro di storia

Duecentonovanta pagine a fianco di George (omonimo dell’autore) Bowling, un quarantacinquenne pingue, tristemente sposato, che inizia a ricordare il giorno in cui si reca a Londra per ritirare la propria dentiera. Ricorda i primi anni del secolo, quando era un adolescente a Lower Binfield e arriva alla conclusione che niente come la pesca è stato importante nella sua vita. La pesca identifica la sua giovinezza, quello stagno pieno di sogni enormi dove sarebbe bastato far calare un amo, avere una canna e una lenza per tirarli su.
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.
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

Passammo davanti al negozio. Nessuno l’aveva rilevato alla morte del papà. Era chiuso e la vetrina era nera di polvere, e dalla insegna avevano bruciato via con la fiamma ossidrica l’“S. Bowling”. Be’, ecco la casa dove ero stato bambino e ragazzo e giovanotto, dove avevo camminato a quattro zampe sul pavimento di cucina e fiutato l’odor di trifoglio e letto Donovan l’Indomabile; dove avevo fatto i compiti per le secondarie, impastato mollica, riparato le forature nei pneumatici e provato il primo colletto duro. Per me aveva significato l’eternità come le piramidi; ed ecco che ora solo un caso poteva farmici rimetter piede. Il papà, la mamma, Joe, il fattorino, il vecchio terrier Nailer, Spot venuto dopo Nailer, Jackie il ciuffolotto, i gatti, i topi nel granaio: tutto finito, nient’altro che polvere.

George fugge in cerca della sua boccata d’aria, ma la sua crisi d’identità in mezzo a due guerre poteva interessare qualcuno? Il libro non ebbe grossa fortuna, venne rivalutato a guerra conclusa, quando ci fu tempo per dedicarsi al punto di vista di chi vede il sole tramontare.

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 seta

Orwell anticipa Sinclair Lewis e Steinbeck, non fosse per l’ambientazione, George potrebbe essere Babbit o Ethan che agiranno pochi anni dopo di lui nel nuovo continente, al riparo dalle bombe cadute dal cielo d’Inghilterra.
Il finale del libro coincide con la fine della fuga ariosa e lascia scegliere al lettore quale fra tre possibilità ritiene la più probabile.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am sentimental about my childhood--not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick.”

It’s 1938, and George Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman. The son of a struggling seed merchant, he has risen to life in a London suburb, where he lives with his wife and kids on a typical middle-class street.

“Because, after all, what is a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.”

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.

“It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of.”

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.

There is plenty of Orwellian social commentary here, but as a nostalgic person myself who has experienced a drastic change in civilization’s priorities along with the complete transformations of the places I once called home, I was caught up in the personal side of the story, and commiserated with George Bowling’s experiences.

It struck me that my father went through a similar trajectory to George in this story. It was the US instead of England, and WWII instead of WWI, but it all sounds so familiar. He used to tell of a simpler time, and he had a look in his eye when he thought about his children’s futures, as if he just couldn’t make the shift and imagine what they might contain. I remember that look so well. He wanted to give us advice, but realized all he had believed in, all he knew, would not apply anymore. Looking back with understanding now, my heart breaks for him.

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.

“1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the chance to learn.”

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poor George Bowling. Fat, 45, married with two kids and an insurance salesman. Living in a semidetached house on Ellesmere road.“ Because, after all, what IS a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.”
In a fit of nostalgia and with some winnings from a bet he decides to go back to his childhood town and fish in a pond he never did when he was a kid.
The book is narrated by George. From the opening line “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” I knew I was going to enjoy this story of an ordinary guy living a pretty ordinary life. He gets nostalgic, remembers his childhood (why are boys so cruel to animals?),the town, Lower Binfield; his brother and parents, school, work, his first love and fishing, lots of fishing talk. Then he’s off to the First World War. Post war he gets his insurance job, gets married and gets fat. “You know how it is. One night you go to bed still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side of the grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.”
Set (and written) in 1938 there’s a prewar atmosphere, but the major theme is nostalgia and the misplaced belief that you can return to scenes of your childhood and recapture the magic. I highlighted so much of this novel as I was reading, the writing is wonderful and very funny particularly in the early parts.

[Yanitsa Genova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Чудесна книга, четох я с лекота и същевременно насъбрала се тъга по онези места, където се връщаме, но нито те, нито ние сме същите.
"Да поемеш още въздух! Но въздух няма.!"

[Ehsan'Shokraie' · Rating 4 out of 5]

در باب جرج اورول و آثارش بسیار میتوان گفت..در جوانی به پاریس میرود..پاریس در ان زمان محل تجمع نویسندگان,هنرمندان بیکار و کلا هر که بویی از هنر برده بود یا که میخواست بویی از هنر بدهد...به اصطلاح پاریس رفتن,اس و پاس بودن و تیپ هنری مد بود..
حال جرج ارول از طبقه متوسط/بالا ی انگلستان هم در این خیل وارد میشود و با ظرفشویی و خدمتکاری شروع به مزه مزه کردن بدبختی و فقر میکند..در واقع جرج اورول بدبخت و اس و پاس نیست تنها نظاره گری ست در این خیل جمعیت..
خاطرات وی هم نماینده همین است در کتاب "اس و پاس در پاریس و لندن"
حال در کتاب هوای تازه همچون دختر کشیش اورول رویکرد جدیدی اتخاذ کرده...شخصیت پردازی!
پردازش یک شخصیت,کارمند ی از طبقه متوسط,با ويژگی ها و زندگی متوسط,در واقع این شخصیت نماینده متوسط ترین افراد متوسط ترین طبقه در انگلستان است..فردی ست که هزاران هزار نفر مانند او بوده و هست..زیبایی کار هم همینجاست..یک زندگی معمولی یک انسان معمولی..داستانی که هر روز اطراف ما رخ میدهد و هیچ یک نمیخواهیم بشنویم و هیچ یک حتی نمیخواهیم تصور کنیم همچین شخصی داستانی دارد..