Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism. That the book itself is not sour, but constantly fresh and frequently funny, is the result of Orwell's steady, unsentimental attention to the telling detail his dry, quiet humor his fascination with both the follies and the excellences of his characters and his courageous refusal to embrace the comforts of any easy answer.Įric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Orwell keeps both of his edges sharp to the very end-a 'happy' ending that poses tough questions about just how happy it really is. In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all-that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself. He etches the ugly insanity of what Gordon calls 'the money-world' in unflinching detail, but the satire has a second edge, too, and Gordon himself is scarcely heroic.

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell has created a darkly compassionate satire to which anyone who has ever been oppressed by the lack of brass, or by the need to make it, will all too easily relate. women won't love you.' On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra-a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of 'mingy, lower-middle-class decency' he is fleeing in his downward flight. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), 'If you have no money. Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already,' a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake,' Gordon has given up a 'good' job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god and Gordon is losing the war.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell