Homage, Take 2: what about Aragon? | Homage to Catalonia (The Complete Works of George Orwell)

Might be his best work | Homage to Catalonia (The Complete Works of George Orwell) | George Orwell

books:


	• Homage to Catalonia (The Complete Works of George Orwell) George Orwell Secker & Warburg, 1986 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Orwell ...revolutionary time capsule.

My mother spent a frightful childhood in revolutionary Barcelona near the cathedral "Sagrada Famila"...FAI(anarchist)territory. Orwell's account is extremely close to what my mother recounts.

She recounted to me the compulsory closed fist salute in front of the local church,turned party headquarters and the frightened crawling across the kitchen floor as bullets flew between the closely billeted militas every night. A horrible period of history...the precursor to WWII.

Orwell did not let ideology hamper his account of the facts. There is more detail than dialectic in "Homage".

My mother's family were secret members of the Flange who issued false costa rican visas, mostly to clergy who were forced to work in their backyard digging redundant trenches...the condition of ones hands determined the fate of many at the hands of the proletarian police who assessed the class ranking of people by the condition of their hands as they crossed the french border. This fact is alluded to by Orwell...in Homage.

The family took one of the french refugee ships mentioned in the book just ahead of Communist agents!The hotels mentioned in the book were really controlled by the various militias-the churches were really gutted. Orwell's honesty and decency shines in "Homage to Catalonia".

The real tragedy of the civil war was the defeat of the center...as in Germany, the loonies prevailed.

Orwell was honest and detailed about the spanish dilemma. Homage enshrines Orwell as a reliable literary time capsule...one of the goals for writing that he claimed in his essay "Why I Write".

for more information click here

Homage, Take 2: what about Aragon?

After re-reading Catalonia, some 20 years after my first encounter, I am disappointed. I do not think that this is Orwell's best work. It has many of his strengths, mainly the elegant, efficient and straightforward prose that he developed so impressively, but there are some flaws. Main flaw in my view is the fact that the main political theme has become dead and irrelevant. Stalin died some decades ago, the Soviet Empire collapsed, we don't need to dig in the little details of their abominable strategies any longer. Of course we can't blame Orwell for the fact that his concerns are not ours any more. But it shows that the book was not timeless in the sense of surviving its immediate subject, as his other non-fiction did.
Second main weakness of the book: the narration of the Barcelona street fighting and the attempts at understanding them are rather boring.
On the strong side: the tales from the Aragon front are much more interesting. Orwell saw less fighting than he was keen to experience, but he describes the trench routine with the same livelyness that he brought to Wigan coalmines and Paris restaurants previously.
He did see enough fighting to get dangerously injured. People said to him that few men survive a shot through the neck, so he was lucky. He thinks he would have been luckier if he had not been shot at all.
Orwell published the book a few months after his adventure, and before the Spanish Civil War was over. Surprisingly the book was a commercial failure then, and equally surprisingly it has later been named as one of the best non-fiction books of the century.
Why was it ignored in the early time? Possibly because he told the world things that the world didn't want to know. He busted the myth that there was a confrontation of the good and the bad in Spain, that democracy fought fashism. Orwell shows us that there were at least 3 camps, not 2. The most vicious fighting that he experienced was among the 'good guys'. The government side was influenced strongly by the communist party who had secured the support from Russia. Since no other country provided weapons to the government side, that secured a lot of mileage.
Orwell was a hopeless romantic, who loved the feeling of working class rule that he got when he first arrived in Barcelona. That must be the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible book title. That basically socialist attitude must also have put quite a few potential readers off at the time of publication.
Orwell later saw the few months in Spain as his political training period. It put him off communism and Stalin for good, but confirmed his socialist attitude, which however never found a political home in a party, though he did support Labor in his remaining years, from the outside.

for more information click here

Might be his best work

he's realy got an amazing way of turning a phrase. if you are at all interested in the Spanish Civil War this book is a great introduction.

for more information click here

A Supplement and an Obituary

"Homage to Catalonia" has long passed from the shelf for current events to the shelf of primary historical sources. No one can study the Spanish Civil War without encountering it. On that basis, it's a five-star book; all primary sources should get five stars. As a reading experience, it's not without weaknesses, which the earlier review by H. Schneider examines cogently. I refer you to that review.

Today's newspapers (7-11-08) carried extended obituaries for David Smith, who died in Berkeley, CA, at age 95. Mr. Smith was one of the only 30-some veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the volunteer contingent of Americans who joined the republican cause in Spain to stop fascism before World War II. The defeat of the republican forces, due at least partly to their own turmoils as described by Orwell, allowed the dictator Franco to suppress the 20th Century in Spain until his welcome death in 1975. David Smith was wounded in Spain in 1938. He returned to America, settled in New York, and married Sophie Kaplan, a marriage that lasted 59 years. Smith worked as a machinist, a union organizer, and for 18 years as a public school biology teacher in New Rochelle, where he campaigned for school integration.
David Smith and his wife were active Communist Party members in the 1940s and 1950s, but left the party in disillusionment in the early 1960s. He was one of the victims of blacklisting in the McCarthy era. He retired to Vermont in 1977, and then to California two decades later. During his long retirement, Smith was a dedicated campaigner for peace, a familiar personage at anti-war demonstrations, and an active raiser of relief funds for Central American countries hit by civil strife.

I knew David Smith reasonably well. He was a man of sincerity and integrity; I doubt that he ever did anything in his life that failed to meet his standards of conscientious humanity. He meant to do well, and he did what he believed was right. His support for the welfare of working people and for oppressed people everywhere was unwavering. He had no lust for power or fame. Like several other grass-root American Communists I've known, he was above all a decent guy. That he was naive about Stalinist Russia is clear; that he wasn't always right about his positions seems clear also, but who is? But to portray such a person as a menace to free society, an unscrupulous plotter, a pawn in the game of Kremlin masterminds is libel and foolishness, and a self-deception honorable people in America cannot afford.

for more information click here

Orwell re-visited

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell at the zenith of his journalistic style--brutally candid in its description of the battlefield and the politics of the Spanish Civil War in which he participated as a volunteer foot soldier against the military insurgency. The Civil War was, of course, a prelude to WWII and while this is clearly adumbrated in Orwell's vivd descriptions of the antagonists, he could not have anticipated the future conflagration. It is a "must read" not only for those interested in the politics of the conflict but also for anyone desiring a candid insight into the plight of the combatants.

for more information click here