27 November 2012

Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell was born in India more than a century ago, in 1903. At age nineteen he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, a time that inspired his first novel Burmese Days. In 1927 he moved to London and lived around Portobello Road. He lived as a tramp and collected material for his first published essay The Spike, which is the second part of the book shown below. The first part was originally called A Scullion's Diary. It was written after Orwell had moved to Paris, the Latin Quarter where also Hemmingway and Fitzgerald had lived, in 1928.

This book is not as much a novel as it is an auto-biography. I enjoyed the first part better than the second, because I think the descriptions were more colourful in the stories about his life as a plangeur. Down and Out in Paris and London was rejected twice. It was finally published with several alterations and a different title. That's when Eric Blair became George Orwell, many years before he wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four which made him famous. This book right here I liked a lot. I found it interesting to read, with bits and pieces of French in it, and I like the essay character too. 


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