Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

£4.495
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Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.495
£4.495 FREE Shipping

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Il romanzo è da leggere come una triologia con "Keep the aspidistra flying" e "The Clergyman's daughter": tutti e 3 descrivono in modo lucido e spietato la Gran Bretagna nella depressione degli anni 30, con lo spettro della Seconda Guerra Mondiale che aleggia pesante come le esercitazioni aeree che sfrecciano nel cielo. It seems to take all the bounce out of you, like when you suddenly discover in a public place that the sole of one of your shoes is coming off. He is undoubtedly fearful of the future as he gets the sense that war is approaching, foreseeing food queues, soldiers, tyranny and despotism.

He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting – even when this means accepting "concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes.He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family, and this aspect comes through strongly in George Bowling’s memories too. This started me off, in the rather irritating way I have sometimes, talking about neutral fruit- trees, wondering what they looked like and what countries they grew in, until finally Hilda got angry.

This past utopian lifestyle, appears to be in complete contradiction with his current station in life. The final disappointment is that the estate where he used to fish has been built over, and the secluded and once-hidden pond that contained the huge carp he constantly intended to take on with his fishing rod but never got around to has become a rubbish dump. When you've time to look about you, and when you happen to be in the right mood, it's a thing that makes you laugh inside to walk down these streets in the inner-outer suburbs and to think of the lives that go on there. 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 the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches. He and Connolly would leave the school grounds and set out across the Downs to Beachy Head, or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the Sussex countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and Westdean and Jevington.This second part is a lengthy exposition which feels so authentic and drawn from life, that once more we wonder about the two Georges. 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. The Sunday Times reviewer on this novel comments that Coming Up for Air is ‘Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic’, which is certainly not fully true.

As I stepped out of the front door a nasty little gust of wind caught the soapy patch on my neck and made me suddenly feel that my clothes didn't fit and that I was sticky all over. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. From George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Coming Up for Air is the classic, comic novel about the everyday struggles of the common man and a satiric look at the trappings of middle-class suburbia. Yet you still feel a strange kind of ownership over somewhere that used to mean a lot to you, and a sense of loss. 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!One day, after winning some money from a bet at the races, George steals away from his family to visit the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you've bitten into a sour apple. 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.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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