George Orwell (1903–1950)

Down and Out in Paris and London is not a novel ... it’s a searing autopsy of dignity. Orwell drags you by the throat into the bowels of human existence, where grease coats your lungs, your stomach gnaws itself from hunger, and the stench of unwashed humanity clings like a curse you can’t scrub off.

Forget the polite image of “living rough.” This is the real thing: lice, filth, starvation, humiliation ... the slow rot of a man who’s become invisible. Orwell doesn’t romanticize show more poverty; he vivisects it. He shows you how despair isn’t loud or tragic ... it’s tedious, monotonous, and smells of cold cabbage water and damp wool.

His time in the Paris kitchens is a nightmare of futility ... endless piles of filthy plates, scalding water, and the hiss of oil so thick with grime you feel slimy just reading the words. Then London arrives like a wet slap ... the soup kitchens, the tramps shuffling from workhouse to workhouse, the cold so deep it seeps into your thoughts. It’s not just poverty you feel ... it’s degradation made tangible, a slow suffocation of spirit.

I read this book as a lazy, cocky young man and it scared the hell out of me. It was the slap I needed. I could smell the rot in those pages, taste the bitterness, and I swore I’d never, ever let myself fall into that kind of oblivion. Orwell made the struggle real and made me get off my ass and do something about it.

This isn’t literature to admire. It’s literature to endure. It doesn’t entertain; it haunts. You don’t finish it clean. You finish it grateful. For anyone who's ever thought about living hard just to experience that existence, read this ... and take the better road. show less

This is the most frightening book I have ever read. I probably feel this way because I am living through the first four weeks of the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. I see so many parallels in this book with the direction our new government is going that this book almost seems like nonfiction rather than the dystopic fiction it was meant to be. I am terrified that my country is becoming a dictatorship. This book gives an outline of just how such a situation can happen.

The story show more takes one man, Winston Smith, who longs for freedom of thought and shows how he is slowly deprived of his ability to think for himself because his life is under control of Big Brother.

"How does one man assert power over another, Winston?"
Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said. show less

First things first. This is not a happy book, nor is it a quick jaunt through the meadow of careless reading. "1984" is the sum of two things: George Orwell's immense grasp of worldbuilding, and George Orwell's appreciation for his own intellectual farts.

If you are hoping to read this classic middle-century critique of fictional totalitarianism for a hopeful twinge at the end, you will be sorely disappointed. This is a tale of a hero who is not a hero, a government that is not a government, show more and a fundamentally unnecessary essay-style recap of the "events as they stand" bridging the gap between two major plot points.

1984 is a story about Winston Smith, an unassuming man nearing the age of forty in a world utterly dominated by a governmental system known only as the Party. You are immediately treated to a wealth of worldbuilding around Newspeak—a form of verbal information control masquerading as a language—and Ingsoc—English Socialism, Orwell's invention as inspired by socialist movements in Russia / Germany / China. There's a lot of onboarding, a lot of words thrown at you to be defined at some nebulous later date.

Despite being one of the chief "calling cards" of 1984, there is a profound LACK of Newspeak. We are treated to handful of words, or more accurately, UNwords which reduce the scope of English down to the bare essentials. Terms like BLACKWHITE, DOUBLETHINK, and CRIMESTOP. We are given definitions for these terms, and occasionally direct translations of full Newspeak sentences used in day-to-day life, but the actual prevalence OF Newspeak is cavernous in its absence. Like, if I can be honest, having DOUBLETHINK explained five separate times is immersion-breaking, man.

This is not because the concept of DOUBLETHINK, to believe in a pair of conflicting things at once, is boring. This is because the main character, Winston, reiterates his deductions on the meaning and role of Newspeak words such as DOUBLETHINK within the safety of his own mind three times too many. As a protagonist, Winston is hard to connect with. While I certainly did my best to meet at his level, Orwell makes it profoundly hard to connect with Winston Smith each time he uses the poor man as an authorial mouthpiece for political theory. Much of the meandering socio-economic conversations 1984 has with itself exist outside the characters' collective thought-space, pushing against their natural conclusions as story-telling devices.

What this means is that Winston will launch into an internal diatribe directed at nobody but himself, but he is supposed to be the reader, and the reader is also supposed to be lurking over his shoulder watching things happen, and the reader is also a nonentity whose impact is merely observational. Even the introduction of a firebrand such as Julia, a young woman brought up within the boundaries of the Party and no comprehension of the things outside it, fails to knock Winston out of a perpetual injured-wing death spiral. From the beginning of the book, things are simply happening to Winston and every matter is considered a rote expectation from him.

This is furthered by the ending, in which he is—to summarize down to the barest bones—is brainwashed into a state of passive obedience through tactics of mind control, reality control, stimulus control, and fear implantation. It is implied that Winston has not had a single thought which is his own, yet he is treated like a sort of pariah for behaving exactly as "irrationally" as the Party expected him to. THOUGHTCRIME, the idea that wrongdoing begins in the mind and the physical crime is merely secondary, is touted as the reasoning for Winston's ultimate fate. Yet conversely, the protagonist swears to die hating the figurehead overlord BIG BROTHER, master of the Party, even if only for a moment. Then he suffers for a chapter or so of implied timeskipping, and dies loving BIG BROTHER.

There's a message here, sure, but it is hidden by the heavy-handed theological ninja death shits that Orwell is unleashing in this public bathroom, one stall over from mine. I'm not even going to touch the fact that roughly one-half of a loooong chapter is just a recap of the political theory as established by the preceding 180ish pages, written by an invented heretic against the Party, which spans completely unbroken for paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. Winston doesn't even engage with this stuff. Like me, he admits that it just regurgitates all the things he already thought while being wordier—snootier—about the delivery. A disproportionate amount of this could have been a 3 sentence email!

Orwell subjects the reader to more of this meandering Socialism & Faults In Hierarchical Society 101 by pretending that his protagonist is reading this to his lover, with the intent of explaining it to her younger and less-theologcally-inclined mind. Winston does not, in fact, read this to his lover. We read it, as Emmanuel Goldstein drags on and on and on about the concept of reality control—something WELL established by this point in the story. Joy! I checked to see when this diatribe ended, or when the story actually picked up again, just to give myself the strength to forge on. Five more pages... Four more pages...

Ultimately, I did actually enjoy this book. I liked Syme, Parsons, O'Brien, Julia, and even Winston well enough. The pacing was alright until the last 1.5 chapters, and the worldbuilding was fundamentally insane with all the details that my brain likes to meander on. There were a lot of chillingly cruel scenes, a surprisingly forward-thinking approach to partners with previous sexual experience, and some era-typical nonsense about the effectiveness of torture. I think that THE BOOK should have just been a stand-alone addendum partnered with 1984 as additional reading, and that Orwell should have released at least some semblance of the 11th Newspeak Dictionary. That would have been awesome to build a TTRPG with, and a bit more fun than the seemingly-rushed final send-off of the last chapter.

As a book that treads into commentary on the modern day, it is definitely worth a read. Many elements of CRIMESTOP, the idea of becoming deliberately stupid as to avoid being reasoned with, are used in our political landscape alongside other terms cleverly initiated by Newspeak. No matter the party that you are addressing, the matter of purposeful unknowing and the concept of unmaking words which mean things is a constant threat. It is important to know that the opposite of good is not ungood, but evil, and that UNGOOD merely means the lack of good. 1984 does not make me feel disheartened, however, despite the harrowing finality of its own tale. Rather, it is defined specifically by the role that Winston plays in his torture scenes. Mankind, refusing to be destroyed by the unreality of a broken society. Winston Smith is a character who fails, but we know in our hearts that for a split second before the bullet struck him dead, he thought: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. So, march on.

Favorite character? That fat old prole doing her laundry outside the Charrington shop. I hope she's doing well. If anyone has her number, let me know. show less

It is quite amazing that a novel which is so depressing and so negative has not only been read widely but is still consumed by many people today. Why? Nothing positive happens and even more, it paints a very bleak picture of a possible future. The same thing that happened to me must have happened to many people: I couldn't put it down and I can't tell you why. Perhaps George Orwell's mastery of storytelling is even more amazing than his talents for prognostication.

The year is 1984, show more ironically now in our past, and the entire world is split up into a very few totalitarian states. Never do we learn if in fact these states are ruled by a single dictator and to me that was part of the intrigue because you never quite know how everything works. An rather anonymous office worker by the name of Winston, in charge of forging the past, decides to keep a diary to note down all those facts and thoughts he wants to keep. We get the distinct feeling that Winston isn't sure himself if his memories are truly real and truly his own. Every external piece of evidence to a threatening past is constantly erased or changed. We follow him as he searches for true history and true facts and we learn how someone survives in a state where nothing you do is ever private and where paranoia is simply common sense.

The novel 1984 gives us a protagonist who has no hope, and more sadly: no apparent interest in a better future. He is not even sure if he can remember if there was such a thing as a better past. His main talent, and that thing which appears to drive us mostly in going along with his telling, is his desire to write down everything he experiences in the hopes of coming up with some explanation as to how the world ended up in such a mess. He is curious about what is happening to him and his world but he doesn't seem to have any inclination in changing it. We are told he does indeed want revolution but the true inspiration or insight isn't there. Instead he appears to be eternally searching for answers which he hopes will tell him: was I making the past up or was it really different?

I keep coming back to the central question: why do people read this novel with such great interest? It is not escapist literature in any sense and the book lacks every feel-good trope we've come to expect from works of fiction. Yet, with all the gloom and darkness we're fascinated as to what will happen next and we can't stop wondering how the somber world of Big Brother keeps on ticking. show less