The other week I finished George Orwell's
Keep the Aspidistra Flying. What an altogether fantastic read!!! I'm not an Orwell fanboy but suffice it say I was thoroughly impressed and would even go so far as to say that
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is, like
Dead Souls, one of those books it'd be a crime not to read before leaving this swollen, perspiring planet of ours. Haven't read a book of this calibre in months it seems.
I was inspired to give this book a shot after catching a film adaptation of it called
A Merry War, starring Richard E. Grant (one of my absolute favorite actors of all time). The woman who played his girlfriend in the film, Helena Bonham Carter, was also first-rate, as they say. As far as films go, it was fairly conventional (not all that cinematically ambitious) but I liked it all the same because the story and acting were compelling all the way through.
Here is a synopsis of the book for those who give a fuck, flying or otherwise:
London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. 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. 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 ... 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.
Wooo-cheee-beee, beee-yotch!
