tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post2480893139324689060..comments2023-12-31T13:47:05.758+00:00Comments on Fat Man on a Keyboard: A confessionThe Plumphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244528534476387323noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post-80685650275324523242010-07-30T10:00:51.940+01:002010-07-30T10:00:51.940+01:00Shuggy
I was suggesting that it was the Fallada b...Shuggy<br /><br />I was suggesting that it was the Fallada book that was more subtle than I described.<br /><br />The bit of 1984 that you remember is one of the bits that I always remember too. It is pure Orwell as it is an outsider's observation. I find that in all his writing he looks at everything from the outside, with perception and analysis, but without empathy. This makes him a brilliant essayist and polemicist, but only a moderate novelist.The Plumphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09244528534476387323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post-73155230474296270662010-07-29T20:23:38.577+01:002010-07-29T20:23:38.577+01:00It is worth reading George as the book is much mor...<i>It is worth reading George as the book is much more complex than the picture I painted.</i><br /><br />It is - yet it isn't. At base Orwell argues that fear and self-preservation are the strongest of human impulses. It's a fundamentally depressing view of the human condition that is too glooomy even for me to accept. There's one observation in the book that stayed with me, for some reason. It's when Winston is on a train traveling to see Julia and he sees a woman clearing a blocked pipe with coat-hanger wire in the freezing cold. He observes - and I paraphrase - that while some would argue that the lack of contrary experience would mean she was oblivious to the dismal nature of her <i>sitz im leben</i>, the look on her face suggested otherwise. I know he attempted to deal with this sense of the intrinsic banality of suffering but it is perhaps this he failed to carry to its 'logical conclusion'?Shuggyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00298179140317536572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post-2596065564389132582010-07-26T13:01:21.349+01:002010-07-26T13:01:21.349+01:00It is worth reading George as the book is much mor...It is worth reading George as the book is much more complex than the picture I painted. I think that Orwell's picture of betrayal is limited, not in so much as that it happens and that people can be broken, but that it is permanent, inevitable and consists of more than informing or confessing, but marks a complete acceptance of the legitimacy of power, a mental conversion and rejection of resistance.<br /><br />Fallada is much more subtle and probably closer to reality, though with some awkward and less credible transitions. As you say, it wasn't a conscious attempt to create a dystopia but to write of the experience of living under the Nazi regime.<br /><br />And it is a wonderful translation.The Plumphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09244528534476387323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post-16122209219752406162010-07-25T22:03:52.179+01:002010-07-25T22:03:52.179+01:00Just picked this up, Peter. I have yet to read the...Just picked this up, Peter. I have yet to read the Fallada, which is embarrassing as I was doing a gig with Michael a couple of weeks ago after not having seen him for two or three years. He is an absolutely outstanding translator.<br /><br />I suppose all utopian / dystopian novels are going to wear a bit thin after a while. They are necessarily programmatic and the ideas tend to take over from the characters. I think the world of 1984 would be recognised by a lot of Eastern Europeans in the Fifties, so credit to Orwell for that. The book remained samizdat in Hungary until after 1989, and that must mean something too. Perhaps we forget the Stalinist model a little too quickly. It seems like a bad dream on another planet. 1984 is very much a product of it.<br /><br />The terrible betrayal at the end of 1984 had happened several times over in real life, with others if not with O'Shaughnessy. I am not sure if the book's dynamic would have worked with a more heroic ending in any case. Once you wind a clock up it keeps going.<br /><br />Which is, you might argue, the problem with the book.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36841665.post-81795841740262012882010-07-22T23:46:38.930+01:002010-07-22T23:46:38.930+01:00Agreed Peter. '1984' is an excellent examp...Agreed Peter. '1984' is an excellent example of what Orwell himself called "Good Bad Books". I am also not much taken with "Animal Farm" either. Orwell's only long work which I would willingly re-read is "Homage to Catalonia". His novels are weak and by degrees defeatist. The contrast between these novels and his best short journalism – the stuff he wrote to pay the rent – is striking. An amirer of long standing, I have come to deplore that strange streak in him that could not value what others did for him – especially women. Eileen O'Shaughnessy (buried less than half a mile from where I am typing this) is a case in point. Orwell may well have been "deeply cut up by her [sudden] death" (Muggeridge) but there is precious little evidence of this in his writing that I know. O'Shaughnessy had courageously refused to give the Communist secret police any details of Orwell's whereabouts in Barcelona in 1936; in '1984' Orwell has Julia and Winston betray each other rather than face their demons. 'Everyone betrays everyone else' was a lie within his own experience.Anton Dequehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07076828639042541217noreply@blogger.com