It is said that nostalgia is felt more by the old. But even a four-year old will talk about when they were young, chat with a sense of maturity about when they were “a baby”; have memories of how things used to be. Sometimes they are happy memories, sometimes regretful, sometimes highly coloured in their imagination, just as ours are. The only difference seems to be that for tiny tots, their sense of time seems to stretch out more than for older people: Ognuno di noi ha un ricordo struggente della propria giovinezza, quella di George fu interrotta niente meno che dalla Grande Guerra ed ora, mentre ricorda, il mondo sta andando ad ampie falcate verso il secondo tragico conflitto mondiale, ed ora, mentre leggo, Hamas ha attaccato Israele e probabilmente molti dei ventenni che lo hanno fatto, nemmeno hanno mai sentito parlare di guerre mondiali, hanno solo sentito parlare dei loro territori invasi. Nereden ve nasıl başlasam bilemiyorum. Öncelikle tek sözcükle özetleyeyim de. Mükemmel! Gerçekten mükemmel bir kitaptı. Hayvan Çiftliği ve 1984 ile tanınan George Orwell'in bence ilk okunması gereken eseri. Çünkü zekasını, sözcüklerle oynama becerisini ve muhteşem bir yazarın sinyalini veren çok güzel bir eser bu.

Kitabı çok sevmemin bir diğer büyük sebebi de tabii ki George Orwell'in müthiş İngiliz ironisi ile bezediği anlatım. 1984'te daha çok karamsar ve iç karartıcı bir hava hakim iken burada son derece eğlenceli bir dil hakim. Bazı yerlerdeki anlatıma hayran kaldım diyebilirim. Mesela, İngiltere'de yaşayanlar bilirler, Mart ayında yalancı bir yaz havası ortaya çıkar ve hava birkaç günlüğüne inanılmaz güzel ve sıcak geçer. Hani Türkiye'de pastırma yazı kavramı vardır ya... Aynı ona benzer bir dönem. Onu bakın ne güzel ifade etmiş: George Bowling, the middle-aged, middle-income protagonist is a great vehicle for Orwell's musings on pre-WW2 England. Bowling is an insightful, straight talking Everyman character who conveys his thoughts with great honesty and self-deprecating humour. 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.Ve Tanrım ne güzel bir gündü! Genelde martta görülen ve kışın ansızın mücadeleden vazgeçer gibi olduğu şu günlerden. Son birkaç gündür insanların "açık" dediği, gökyüzünün soğuk ve sert bir mavi olup rüzgarın kör bir jilet gibi insanı rendelediği şu pis havalar hakimdi. Sonra rüzgar dindi ve güneş kendine bir fırsat buldu. Bilirsiniz o günleri." Evet o günler ancak bu kadar güzel anlatılabilirdi. 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. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.”

The book also contains some hints at what was to come with ' Nineteen Eighty-Four' which Orwell would write a few years later - specifically musings on an "after-war" dystopian future characterised by hate, slogans, secret cells etc. Remarkably prescient and demonstrating he was already thinking about some of the themes that were later developed so memorably in ' Nineteen Eighty-Four'. 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.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. His namesake, the author had been too young to fight in World War I, but had fought in Catalonia, in the Spanish civil war, initially for the Republican army, although the politics became very complicated. His book “Homage to Catalonia” records this time. It was there that he received the wound from which he was recuperating at the time of writing this novel. Standing against the trench parapet at 6 ft 2 in., he was an easy target, and wounded in the throat by a sniper’s bullet. At the outbreak of the Second World War, George Orwell applied for war work, but said: “They won’t have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs”. That was a mere few months after the close of this novel. Although Eric Blair was born in British India, in what he described as a “lower upper middle class” family, from the age of one he spent most of his childhood in England with his mother and two sisters. They lived at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire while their father was a civil servant in British India. Although his origins were slightly more genteel than George Bowling’s, Eric Blair’s friends were similar. He attended a day school rather than a public school in the same area at the same time, and his pursuits were the same as other boys’. Later he spent much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and then at Eton. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family, and this aspect comes through strongly in George Bowling’s memories too. In fact you may feel that whenever George and his friends spot any sort of wildlife—baby thrushes, toads, fishes etc., they seem to want to kill them, and the more dramatically the better. One of Orwell’s less well known novels; it is a rather bleak comic novel written and set in 1938/1939. It is a well written novel about nostalgia, the lower middle classes, relationships between men and women and middle age. Orwell is primarily a political writer and as he said himself, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Given works like 1984 and Animal Farm, it isn’t surprising that this one can be forgotten.

Set in the pre WWII early 1940s, this book takes us through the life of George Bowling, as a child and adolescent pre-WWI, in a town called Lower Binfield. It is not a particularly miserable childhood, but neither was he the popular boy. His time is the army was no less inspiring; following a minor injury at the front he was sent to a remote stores dump, where he was to monitor non-existent military stores. 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.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.

George Orwell’s political affiliations varied throughout his life and his views were complex. However in Coming Up for Air he shows a paradoxically conservative strain. He uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man, to examine the decency of a past England and to express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. This book is imbued with George Orwell’s deep love of British traditions, much as we find in his essays “A Nice Cup of Tea” or “In Defence of English Cooking”. It also has some beautiful lyrical and evocative passages. His abiding love of nature and the English countryside is as apparent here as it is in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. 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.

PART I

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: I can’t help but draw parallels between Orwell’s comedic take on bad marriage [ Coming Up For Air] and Tolstoy’s dramatic take on bad marriage [ The Kreutzer Sonata]—the difference being that Orwell’s character blissfully daydreams about the death of his wife (thus the comedy) and Tolstoy’s character actually murders his wife (thus the drama). Is each man questioning the whole institution of matrimony with similar conclusions? Or is it just me? After all, I have personally been twice married and twice divorced. Maybe I’m projecting? … In another chapter that I remember somewhat vividly from this novel, George reminisces about getting to spend a few months alone on an island, at some strange care-taking job, just sitting alone, reading and thinking. Coming up for air, you might say. Life might offer a peaceful interregnum here or there, Orwell suggests, but there's also an awareness throughout his work that the world will not simply allow us to go into hiding and read books. Not for long, anyway. In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Nationalist sniper at Huesca. [2]