Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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. 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. 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. 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: 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.

The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace. The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that (a) speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and (b) his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats. 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!" 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. 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.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. 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's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. 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.

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." 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 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.

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.

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.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 Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves'