orwell

So, uh: For Winston and Julia to be together and in love, even if they make no impact on the world at large, and even if they are eventually brainwashed into hating each other, amounts to a complete defeat of Big Brother - O'Brien tells Winston: "do not imagine history will vindicate you", or somesuch, but since the Party HAS no history - and also wants no progress - the current moment is all that can be said to exist, and so any defeat of the system for one moment IS a major defeat..

so, uh, no to the first, and no to the second, or rather it doesn't matter that they fail to defeat the system but their actions in failing-etc. DO matter, and a lot.

(My 1984 question: is there any link worth noting between real person Emma Goldman and imaginary person Emmanuel Goldstein?)

i certainly detested it when i read it

Animal Farm is a better story, but again overrated. I like some of his essays much better.

I think I'd like 1984 a lot if I'd read it a few years ago. I only finished it last month and any half-baked theorizing above is largely due to having to write about it for A level. I have no idea if I actually like it or not..

Major problem with 1984 is that it is a model of society in which capitalism seems to disappear sometime around about the 1950s (!), which is rather a large flaw in anything held up as relevant today. Also the existence of 1984 gives a certain irritating shorthand for lazy thinking which would probably have horrified Orwell: does saying something is like Big Brother or the Thought Police (Bester's were better, anyway) ever actually shed any light on it?

(anthony in your question is "the world" the one in the book or the one we actually live in?)

I disliked it when I first read it at 10, liked it a lot more when I reread it as a cynicaldepressive 16-year-old, but also can't remember much aside from the clock striking 13 and room 101. I thought Animal Farm brilliant when I was very young but don't know if it'd stand up.

Brave New World = possibly better?

I don't think Orwell wrote good terribly good fiction. Bar the odd well-honed sentence I think his prose was dull or even stiff, and I think he came up with a schematic plot and slotted simple character-shaped things in and hoped they'd pass for people*. I haven't read him in many years, so I have little faith in my opinions here, and there is no point in your taking me at all seriously...

* Obviously this reads better in regard to 1984 than Animal Farm, where nobody expected convincing human beings. This may be why that story works rather more crisply.

Anyway, 1984 is absolutely classic. A great novel of ideas, it sets up its world immediately, and it could well be said that it's downhill after the first chapter, but what a chapter.

I think a lot of it has sunk into the fabric of life (hence Big Brother and room 101), but a lot of it, like Brazil, has got more relevant over the last decade. Apart from John Poindexter's Information Awareness Agency, see the current war without end and basically the 90s as the era of Implausible Deniability: "We and you know that what we are saying is lies, but it will go in the history books and you won't say a thing or we'll sue the hell out of you."

but i haven't read the book for about 30 years so i imagine i don't have a very fair picture of it specifically

only if you assume Bill Gates does not exist!

it's funny, people are always saying that Orwell can't do characters, yet the people in that book are among the most vivid I've ever come across.

https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/823724412729839617

that's from the second part, right? nobody reads that part.

Just checked and yes it is but still, its nowhere near an excuse.

Fkn hilarious tho'.

idg are people just now reading this book for the first time?

"We've always been at war with Eurasia" has been our motto for decades

They're reading it for the first time not assigned in grade school, which for plenty of people means that yeah, it's their first time actually reading it.

idg are people just now reading this book for the first time?

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau)

yes, people are always reading this book for the first time.

'Homage to Catalonia' might be more instructive reading (or 'Down and Out,' really).

One of the local beer theaters in Portland screened the John Hurt adaption on Inauguration Day