Много хубава и запомняща се антиутопична книга... Несъмнено Оруел е създал най-великите творби в този жанр, но и „451 градуса по Фаренхайт“ на Бредбъри намира своето достойно място в него, разпалвайки силна любов към четенето!



„Мразя римляните с тяхното status quo —
казваше той. — Напълни очите си с чудеса, живей като че ли ще умреш след десет секунди. Опознай света. Той е по-фантастичен, отколкото всяка изфабрикувана мечта, за която си даваш парите. Не искай гаранции, не искай сигурност — такива неща светът не познава. И ако ги имаше, те биха приличали на големия ленивец, който ден след ден виси надолу с главата от клона на някое дърво и проспива живота си. По дяволите! — казваше той. — Раздрусай дървото и нека ленивецът се строполи на земята.“

- ديستوبيا كتبت في بداية خمسينيات القرن الماضي، ربما كان الهدف منها تحذيرياً وربما كانت محاولة لوقف هذا التحول وتجنبه لكن في كلتا الحالتين فنحن نعيش في الكثير من التفاصيل الباردة التي وردت في هذه الرواية الخيالية!

- تجري احداث الرواية في مدينة امريكية ما، حيث يتم تقديم مدينة تمنع امتلاك وقراءة الكتب، مدينة حوّلت رجال الإطفاء الى رجال حرائق يسعون خلف الكتاب ويحرقونه، مدينة تحوّلت الى محمية صناعية (بفعل الجدار العازل)، حيطان بيوتها شاشات تلفزة واتصالات (وهذا استشراف ممتاز من الكاتب)، جوها متقلب بشكل مرضي، علاقات الناس باردة ومصطنعة، وذاكرتهم ضعيفة.

- الأحداث تجري في ثلاثة فصول من الكتاب حيث يقوم القسم الأول بتقديم الإطفائي "مونتاغ"، عمله وعائلته والتقائه بكلاريس، تتطور هذه الشخصية من حارقة للكتب الى محبة ومخبأة لها. تدخل شخصيات اخرى كـ "فابر" العجوز ورئيس الإطفائيين اللذان يؤثران بشكل كبير على مونتاغ ويكونان سبباً فيما سيقوم به.

- السرد عادي، التشويق قليل، الفكرة ممتازة، الوصف عظيم، التحول النفسي للشخصية كان مميزاً ايضاً رغم الترجمة السيئة التي لم تستطع نقل الهذيان والصراع النفسي الذي كان يجري داخل "مونتاغ".

- الترجمة: من اسوء الترجمات التي قرأتها يوماً، على سبيل المثال: مشاعل ملتهبة (وليس "ملتهية" ص15)، لم تكن الغرفة خالية (وليس "الفرقة" ص20)، أحس بشفتيه تتحركان وتلامسان سماعة الهاتف (وليس "تلاسمان" ص23)، يأتي غرباء وينتهكونك(وليس "ينتهونك" ص26)، مع ان الخطوط (وليس"من"ص180)، أدرك لماذا لا يجوز له (وليس "يجوزو"ص192)... بعض الجمل: "سارا في ليل الهبّات الدافئة-الباردة على الرصيف المفضض"، " يستمع الى القهقهات الآتية من تحت والخمش الوتير لأقدام الجرذان الراكضة والعياء الكمنجاتي للفئران"!!!!! هل هذه ترجمة؟!

- في مقابلة مع الكاتب ذكر سبب كتابته للرواية:
"لقد كتبت هذا الكتاب في الوقت الذي كنت فيه قلقاً بشأن الطريقة التي تسير بها الأمور في هذا البلد منذ أربع سنوات. الكثير من الناس كانوا خائفين من ظلالهم ؛ كان هناك تهديد بحرق الكتاب. العديد من الكتب كانت تؤخذ من الرفوف في ذلك الوقت. وبالطبع تغيرت الأمور كثيرًا خلال أربع سنوات. الأمور بدأت تعود في اتجاه صحي للغاية. لكن في ذلك الوقت أردت أن أقوم بنوع من القصة حيث يمكنني التعليق على ما يمكن أن يحدث لبلد ما إذا تركنا أنفسنا في هذا الاتجاه ، حيث يتوقف كل التفكير ، ويبتلع التنين ذيله ، وندمر أنفسنا من خلال هذا النوع من العمل."

وبذلك فإن بذور الرواية كانت موجودة على أرض الواقع وقام برادبري بزرعها على الورق منتجاً هذا العمل، لكن اذا كانوا في الغرب قد اجتنبوه فنحن نعيشه في الشرق حيث تسيطر وسائل الإعلام المرئية على المجتمعات، صحف عريقة تتوقف، الكتب مرمية في الزوايا وقلائل من يقرأون، الكتب السيئة معروضة في المعارض او مروّج لها بشكل كبير (أنا لا اغمز من قناة اي جائزة :) )، أكثر الكتب مبيعاً كتب الطبخ والأبراج!!... الخ

¡Qué libro tan bueno! Hace tiempo que no leía algo que me mantuviera hipnotizado por un largo período de tiempo. Me recordó en parte al libro 1984, Winston Smith y Guy Montag tienen cosas en común; como por ejemplo, descubrir que estaban viviendo en una burbuja... en una burbuja totalmente falsa y quizás equivocada.
El libro no es largo, pero creo que no es necesario hacerlo más largo, o si no mataría un poco la historia.
Bueno, la verdad es que no hay mucho que comentar sobre a historia del libro, ya que habla del valor de los libros en sí, de lo útiles e importantes que son, como también el amor que uno le puede llegar a tomar a un libro (o a varios libros). Estoy gratísimamente sorprendido con la historia y me encantó que nombrara tantos libros que son clásicos. Según yo, este es un libro para alguien que no está muy adentrado en el mundo de la lectura, para alguien que no está 100% seguro si quiere pasar su tiempo leyendo, ya que Bradbury "promueve" la lectura y el valor de los libros.
Creo que después de esta historia, cualquier persona se enamorará de la literatura y lo que un libro puede entregar. Un libro es una historia, un mundo, una vida o una muerte. Un libro lo es todo; es el único lugar en el que son solamente tú y un libro, y puedes imaginarte todo conforme a lo que lees, pero imaginarlo a tu manera, lo que hace que la lectura sea única para cada uno de nosotros.
Dicho esto, amo la lectura y quiero leer tantos libros como me sea posible. Los amo a todos.

I don't even know what to say ... How did this become a classic? Fahrenheit 451 is about the worst book I have read this year, and that would be in comparison with books like Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Effect! No, wait, the latter would be the worst, but Fahrenheit comes very close.

I guess everyone knows the plot. A distant future in which books are banned and people who have them are considered criminals. Their houses are burned down, and fire'men' start fires instead of putting them out. The theme is fascinating and something I really would have wanted to see explored properly. Instead, this mess is what Bradbury saw fit to give us.

First, the plot doesn't make sense. Why have books been banned? Why are people not allowed to talk to each other? How did this world come to be? Clarisse makes Montag think, but if this is when he really comes out of his regime-induced haze, why has he hoarded books through the years? What was Mildred's suicide attempt all about? There are just random stuff happening because the author wants them to happen. There is no emotion in the narrative, no flow to the story, and absolutely no dimension to the characters. The writing is flowery and pretentious at times completely obscuring the message or the action. Without these unnecessary padding words, the story would be seriously done within 10 pages. The author could have used these words to instead create a more detailed world.

And I have to ask, what's with all these women? Why are they sitting at home in a FUTURISTIC society? Montag accuses Mrs Bowles of having had twelve abortions. TWELVE! What, in a futuristic society that has a programmed mechanical hound and endoscopes (and apparently safe abortions), they have not managed to invent that little thing called the pill? Or condoms? Seriously? The depiction of women in this supposedly futuristic era is simply ridiculous and stereotypical. Why aren't they out there setting fires to books or something? There is really no sense to this.

The biggest fallacy in the ridiculous plot is that there are some amazing inventions that this society has made. The aforementioned mechanical hound is one such thing. It can be fed with all kinds of information, including the smell of people, and it can be sent off to attack them. It's cool. And it happened because of science. Then there is the endoscope or whatever which clearly saves Mildred. Not to mention the highly technical seashell ear thimbles or the wall televisions. All science. So is the author trying to claim that people just kept science locked up in their heads and never put it down? How can people have learned to make these things without books in the first place? The entire story structure falls down here for me.

Another thing that was absurd was that of ALL the books that Montag might have chosen to have copied, he chose the Bible. Really? I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost rolled right out of my head. Wish they had, then I wouldn't have been able to read the rest of this crap. I've nothing against the Bible or those who read it, but really, not the book I would have thought required urgent copying when there are so many other more useful and enlightening books.

Despite the story being ridiculous, I might have considered it worth my time if I actually agreed with the author. But I don't. While I do agree that reading must be promoted, that's where Bradbury and I part ways. He considers mathematics unnecessary to be taught in schools. I disagree. That's silly. He doesn't think universities are important. I disagree. He seems to think that television is a terrible invention and makes people stupid. That's just ridiculous. There are bad books and good television shows. The worst part of Bradbury's ideas for me is that he seems to think that people who are not intellectuals and don't (or can't) read have nothing to contribute to society. That's pretty elitist and insulting. Sometimes, you don't need books to have common sense or knowledge about certain things. Also, not everyone can afford access to books, and not everyone is literate enough to enjoy reading, and not everyone has the time to read books!

In short, I'm not impressed at all. Bradbury is famously said to have written this book in nine days, and it shows. It really shows.

"Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean." pg 57

Overall this was very thought-provoking. Ray Bradbury used colorful language and descriptive imagery to show a dystopia where books are outlawed. Books have become symbols of confusion, dissent, and full-face challenge to a newly established societal norm. The new norm was books are essentially evil: this included literature, poetry, history, and religious/philosophies texts to include the Holy Bible.

The main character, Guy Montag, was a disenchanted fireman unhappy with life, his job, and his marriage. In this dystopian future, firemen are constantly on mission to find out, destroy book by burning them, and removing society's crutch of knowledge and further confusion. As the story progressed, Guy was transformed from destroying books to becoming someone dedicated to preserving culture and knowledge found in books. His job and his new perspective came to collision as the story progressed.

I have seen this in every bookstore and until now, I was the only person in my social circle who had not read it. It wasn't my favorite book but it was pretty good. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a dystopia where reading is outlawed (sounds like hell to me...). Thanks!

This book is about censorship. GR have censored this review and hidden it from Community Reviews because they do not like what I have to say about Amazon and GR. Oh the irony!It's not like I have any influence, I'm not a professional reviewer or influencer, so I don't know why they care.

Is Fahrenheit 451 the temperature at which Kindles melt?

This book is about censorship by book burning. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. This review is about reading Fahrenheit 451 or any other book considered controversial by any group at all and the future of censorship in the marketplace.

Amazon, GrAmazon, is redefinining our experience of literature! Amazon has evaded having to pay tax and comply with labour laws in many countries, in many US states. Now it is getting around the various laws that protect free speech in order to define what people may or may not read purely for the sake of making Even More Money. America is a capitalist country, Amazon is only 'living the dream' and taking it to the extreme of that cliche, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power of the monopoly.

For Goodreads, comments and shelves are to be self-censored under pain of summary deletion of anything that offends GR, because it is off-topic or criticises the author. Which is of course at the root of it. Since my reviews are generally snippets of my life, they are mostly off-topic, however they do not offend GR and so they still stand. So from this I gather that to offend GrAmazon in any way puts your work at risk of deletion. 'Offence' is always going to be "off-topic". What stunningly clever lawyer thought that one up, it covers everything!

The world of books already for many people defined by Amazon will also in the future be limited by them into the boundaries Amazon sets. At the moment they are deleting books with overtly sexual titles and others with sexual content they don't approve of and also deleting books with political themes. And should Amazon decide to make what they think is appropriate retroactive, well no-one actually owns a Kindle book, it is only rented, and I am sure in the terms of the rental there is a little tiny bit which says they can alter the words "if necessary" or perhaps replace the entire book by another (sanitized) edition.

Most people now, when they think of Eeyore, think of Disney's loveable soft-toy donkey and have no idea of the original irascible, cynical, loner of a character that A.A. Milne wrote. Sickly-sweet Disney is all about profits. It is so much better to have a happy ending, all-American accents and nothing to offend the parents so everything is rewritten to fit those parameters and so these stories pass into folk history with their literary origins forgotten. Imagine if the Little Mermaid had ended as in the original - the Mermaid has the choice between murdering the prince's new wife or committing suicide! So it was rewritten and it is the rewritten version that has become the standard.

How soon before books featuring paedophilia, rape and violence in a positive light are banned or reworked? Nabokov's Lolita won't be first on the firing line, Neither would the Q'uran with Muhammed marrying a 9 year old, and the Bible so full of threats, violence and murder. These books are too well-known to mess with, but self-published authors - they are on the frontline.

This a review that is not at all on-topic but about the repression of books even today, Animal Farm, just as that book is.

And then with Amazon's domination of the SPA market, the eBook market and the world's biggest bookclub, Goodreads, you can forget any laws enshrining freedom of expression in books, because if it doesn't pass Amazon's ideas of what is right and fit to promote profits, it won't be published by them. Publish it any other way, and who will hear of it? Did the books still burn if the people there who saw them on fire had no means to tell anyone else? Did Goodreads censorship really happen if only 1,000 people knew and 19,999,000 don't?

So censorship is not just deleting material, it is making sure that no one knows there is any form of censorship in operation - firstly by threatening people so they self-censor and secondly by limiting drastically the number of people who know about it. Oh the irony if this review is deleted.

What we need is another book company to break Amazon's monopoly, but it won't happen, Amazon will just buy it out. I have no solution to this problem. I forsee a sort of electronic version of Russian samizdat for those 'in the know', for the other 19,999,000 well they say you can't miss what you've never had.

There you go. Capitalism without controls.

The original review on BookLikes.

One of my favorite books of all time - book burning lights the path to tyranny. This book should be required reading for all politicians; but if I had to guess it would be shocking how few of them have read it. With this new wave of book bannings cresting across America I think this book needs to be read now more than ever.

Library as cathedral, as all libraries should be - John Rylands Library, Manchester. Image source

Read me, love me, touch me, treasure me

This is a book about the power of books that is itself steeped with references, both explicit and indirect, to the great works that permeate our culture so thoroughly that we do not always notice them - until they’re gone. Bradbury shows us the horror of a hedonistic but unhappy world where books and ideas are banned in the futile pursuit of the illusion of happiness. As with A Clockwork Orange (see my review HERE), there is a constant tension between the deliciously poetic language and the horrors of the setting.

The intended message of this 62-year-old novel is different: a prescient warning about the addictive power of continuous, passive imbibing from the virtual worlds and interactive screens that are our constant companions. I guess Bradbury was so infused in bookish culture himself that he didn’t realise how loudly the literary message shouts from every page, almost drowning out everything else: read me, love me, touch me, treasure me. Reading is a physical, sensual, transformative relationship, not merely a mental process. See this excellent article (thanks, Apatt!) for Bradbury's views on the persistent misinterpretation of his book: LA Weekly article. It's interesting to compare this with his Usher II, where books are burned for the opposite reason: to make people face reality by quashing imagination. See my review HERE.

Nevertheless, the balance of themes is shifting: smartphones and the Internet of Things mean we’re catching up with Bradbury’s vision. Certainly, I was more aware of his technological warning than on previous readings - but it’s still the insatiable thirst for what is in and from books (ideas, discussion, and knowledge) that stokes my passion for this novel:
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
As Henry Cowles wrote in Aeon recently, “Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives.”

The weak characterisation, cruelly caricatured Mildred, and the rationale and details of the totalitarian state’s oppression, censorship (sadly apt after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January 2015), and warmongering are secondary - just the canvas on which Bradbury delicately paints his nightmare, by moonlight, to the pitter-patter of raindrops and the whisper of falling leaves.

tl;dnr - stick with the four paragraphs, above.


Plot and Narrative Structure

The plot is well-known: It is set in the near future, where all books are banned because they are elitist and hence cause unhappiness and division. Instead, the population is fed continuous inane soap operas to lull their minds into soporific approximation of non-unhappiness. TV really does rot their brains, or at least sap their ability to think for themselves. Firemen no longer put out fires, but instead burn houses where books are found.

Montag is a fireman, so part of the regime. But he is tempted by the unknown promise of what he destroys, takes greater and greater risks, and ends up a fugitive, living rough with other rebels, each of whom has memorised a book so that when things change, they can be rewritten. (Ironically, these people also destroy books - just the physical ones, after they have memorised them.)

There are three parts:

1.t“It Was a Pleasure to Burn” shows the restrictions of Montag’s world, and his growing, but unfocused, dissatisfaction with it, contrasted with beautiful imagery of the natural world, especially moonlight and trees - and fire.
2.t“The Sieve and the Sand” is about confrontation: with self and others - with truth.
3.tFinally, in “Burning Bright”, revelation leads to liberation, danger, and the possibility of freedom. But at what cost?

QUOTES

I had forgotten (or maybe never noticed!) how wonderful the language is. This review is even more focused on quotes than usual, so I never forget.

Contradictions

•t"The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.”
•t“They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement.”
•t“He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.”
•t“He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.”
•t“The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live.”

Mechanical Hound

This thing, this high-tech version of the most atavistic, omnipotent monsters that plague our dreams from infancy, is where Bradbury’s hybrid of beauty and horror reaches its peak:

•t“The moonlight… touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.”
•t“Out of the helicopter glided something that was not machine, not animal, not dead, not alive, glowing with a pale green luminosity.”
•t“He could feel the Hound, like autumn, come cold and dry and swift, like a wind that didn't stir grass… The Hound did not touch the world. It carried its silence with it.”

(Moon) Light, Rain, Nature

•t“Laughter blew across the moon-colored lawn.”
•t“The moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract.”
•t“They read the long afternoon through while the cold November rain fell from the sky in the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and gray-looking without its walls lite with orange and yellow confetti.”
•t“You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds… and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire.”
•t“The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapours for supper.”
•t“The more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty.”

Burned Books as Once-Living Things

•t“The flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch.”
•t“They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.”
•t“The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry.”
•t“Their covers torn off and spilled out like swan-feathers.”
•t“The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.”
•t“Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly.”
•t“The floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.”

Fire

If BuzzFeed is to believed (a medium-sized "if", imo), its original title was not "Fahrenheit 451", but "The Fireman". He and his publishers thought it a boring title, so they called a local fire station and asked what temperature paper burned at. The firemen put Bradbury on hold while they burned a book, then reported back the temperature, and the rest is history.

•tThe opening sentence: “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. with this brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”
•t“The books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
•t“Those who do not build must burn.” (Do they ignite the fire, or are they consumed by it?)
•t“It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”
•t“A bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange.”
•tA bonfire, “was not burning; it was warming... He hadn’t known fire could look this way. He had never thought… it could give as well as take.”

The descriptions of fire are also the best feature of Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder which I reviewed HERE.

Dangers of Books

Many of the reasons given could just as easily apply to TV shows; Faber says as much to Montag, “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books” and that those same things could be in the TV shows, but aren’t. Instead, the TV shows are specially designed to numb minds to all except vague pleasure.

•t“Books aren’t people… my family [soap stars] is people”.
•t“None of these books agree with each other… The people in those books never lived.”
•t“It didn’t come from the government down… Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick… Today… you can stay happy all the time” because only comics, confessions and trade journals are permitted.
•t“The firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord.”
•t“We must all be alike. Not everyone was born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal… Then all are happy”, protected from the “rightful dread of being inferior”.
•t“Our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred”, so everything that might upset anyone is destroyed.
•tFilled with facts, people “feel they’re thinking… they’ll be happy because facts of that sort don’t change.”
•t“All the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, and all the second hand notions and time-worn philosophies.”

Dangers of VR

There is bitter irony in a “living room” where the only “living” is that of fictitious people, passively observed on the huge screens on the walls.

•tEntering the bedroom “was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon had set.”
•t“Her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound… coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty.”
•t“People don’t talk about anything… They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools and say how swell.”
•tBrainwashing: “It’s always someone else’s husband dies.” and “Nothing will ever happen to me.”

General Quotes

•tClarice’s face had “a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity”.
•t“He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness.”
•tA stomach pump: “looking for all the old water and old time gathered there… Did it drink of the darkness?... The impersonal operation… could gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out.”
•t“The world had melted down and sprung up in a new and colorless formation.”
•t“He slapped her face with amazing objectivity.” (It is not being condoned.)
•t“She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked into their nostrils and they plunged about.” That’s why owners shouldn’t be present.
•t“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” A line from a poem by Alexander Smith that Montag glimpses, “but it blazed in his mind for the next minutes as if stamped there with fiery steel.”
•t“His hand had been infected [by picking up a book], and soon it would be his arms. He could feel the poison working up… His hands were ravenous. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.”
•t“I don’t talk things… I talk the meanings of things.”
•t“If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.”
•t“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
•t“They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls.”
•t"There was a crash like falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms."
•t“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” From Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.
•tA buzzing helicopter “like butterflies puzzled by autumn”.
•tA ten-lane highway: “A boatless river frozen there in the raw light of the high white arc-lamps; you could drown trying to cross it.”
•t“His nose was suddenly good enough to sense the path he had made in the air of the room.”

Homework

I choose to inhale and absorb the atmosphere of the book, without stopping every few sentences to investigate each possible reference and quote, but those who enjoy literary detective work will find plenty of material here.

The other mystery is Captain Beatty: he is remarkably well-versed in the classics of literature, philosophy and history. “I was using the very books you clung to, to rebut you… What traitors books can be.” But is that explanation enough?

What Book Would You Be for Posterity?

The obvious question is, if you were going to become a book and memorise it for posterity, what would you choose? Would it be cheating to pick "Fahrenheit 451"? Should it be for personal comfort or something that will be useful in rebuilding society?

The hardest questions is, would you give up everything for literature?

“All we can do is keep the knowledge… We’re no more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise… You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone.” When people ask what we do, “We’re remembering”.

In Summary

I love the fact that this book is a paean to the power of the written word: that people will live and die for it, and will wither without the transformative power of fictional worlds and the insights of others. The lure and love of literature is irrepressible. Books "stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."

Postscript

Related to this - and to 1984 - Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote in a group discussion:
"There's a distinct echo in both books of the Garden of Eden story, with Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And in each case, it's a denial of the dogma that this is the original sin."

Film Adaptations

1966 Film - Watch

Truffaut's 1966 version is visually stunning and broadly faithful to the book. See details on imdb here.

Riffing on This and Truffaut
See Megan Dunn’s brilliant first book, Tinderbox, which I reviewed HERE. She intended to rewrite 451 from the point of view of the female characters, but ended up equally fascinated by Truffaut's adaptation - the very process of adapting the book. The result is a fascinating, personal, and funny exploration of her attempts to adapt someone else’s work. It also includes many fascinating and sometimes surprising details about the film, such as Truffaut hand-picking the books that were burned in the opening scene.

2018 Film - Avoid

Adapting a book for screen can excuse or require changes. But the 2018 one was a travesty that exacerbates the common misunderstanding of Bradbury's intended message AND adds a ludicrous new plot in its place. There is nothing at all about the addictive and mind-numbing allure of superficial soap operas (Montag doesn't even have a wife), but there is a weird sciency thing about books being encoded in the DNA of a bird, so they'll live for ever! It wasn't even well acted or written (I presume it didn't improve in the second half). See details on imdb here.

It was a pleasure to read.

I was somewhat blown away by this novel. Perhaps it is simply my personal taste. I seem to enjoy novels about the future and in particular ones with a dystopian element. (see my reviews of Brave New World and 1984 for example)

I have read a handful of articles about how in analysing this novel most people miss the target. They claim it is a novel about book censorship whereas Bradbury claims it is more a novel focusing on talking about whether other forms of media would destroy our stories. However this is not a didactic text with only one main message (and there are a handful of those which I believe exist). This like all books is one which can be interpreted in various ways without missing the fact that at its heart this is a novel written for entertainment.

Bradbury in his after-word mentions that no one would print a book that featured book censorship at the time he intended to publish it. And book censorship is certainly one clear theme although not necessarily intended to be the main theme. It just so happened that Fahrenheit 451 was published at a time when such a topic was controversial. I doubt however that we can necessarily read a historical or political motivation as such into the novel more that it so happened to be released at that time.

Curiously also in the after-word Bradbury mentioned that his inspiration came through five other stories he had written. Each of them also focusing on books and encounters with the law. He also mentioned that he was inspired by the burnt library books at Alexandria and the Salem witch trials. Curiously the Salem witch trials were the focus of another personal favourite - the play The Crucible - which was written at a similar time and used the witch trials to challenge McCarthyism.

Personally what I saw in the novels were various themes and issues being discussed. I saw a tale about scapegoats and about totalitarian control through the media. I felt that Bradbury's story reveals a lesson about humanity. That we seek to throw blame about human evils upon tools like guns and books but in the end they are just tools. I don't perceive any book as possessing inherent evil although I do believe that there may be ideas contained within them which could perhaps be perceived as such or are at their heart morally flawed. In Fahrenheit 451 the society attempted to destroy the tools to remove such perceived ideas and yet ultimately they replaced the ideas in books with flawed thoughts of their own. For instance they justified killing a man walking on the street or burning a woman alive.

I highly recommend this novel. Bradbury's prose is beautiful and poignantly lyrical. It's sparse and he uses very few elaborate phrases but he has a way of cobbling phrases and metaphors together to beautiful effect. There are times when the writing appears to be in the manner of stream of consciousness but Bradbury writes it well. In fact while his story is a harrowing and on the whole haunting (and somewhat bleak) portrayal he writes it with care, devotion and artistry.

The tale of how firemen become book burners and how one fireman decides to read the forbidden material will not be easily forgotten by me. And I feel that this is a novel which has well stood the test of time and deserves to be called a classic and read and studied by future generations.

Ray Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451, was published in 1953. Over 40 years ago, it was required reading at my school. It's a dystopian novel that has huge applicability today. It impacted me many decades ago and I wanted to read it again.

The main character, Montag, is a fireman with his symbolic helmet that says Fahrenheit 451---the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns. Firefighters are called to burn houses, books, and if need be, people, because books are banned.

Below are passages from the book that resonated with me as well as three songs that came to mind with specific passages.

* You never stop to think what I've asked you.

* Do you ever read any of the books you burn?

* Are you happy?

* What do you talk about?

* Nobody knows anyone.

* Do you notice how people hurt each other these days?

* My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other.

* Nobody says anything different from anyone else.

* There was a list of one million forbidden books.

* When burning books, you weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things.

* There was nothing to tease your conscience later.

* How do you get so empty?

* Nobody listens anymore. (Reminds me of Demi Lovato's song, Anyone. Lyrics below)

ANYONE
I tried to talk to my piano
I tried to talk to my guitar
Talk to my imagination
Confided into alcohol
I tried and tried and tried some more
Told secrets 'til my voice was sore
Tired of empty conversation
'Cause no one hears me anymore

A hundred million stories
And a hundred million songs
I feel stupid when I sing
Nobody's listening to me
Nobody's listening
I talk to shooting stars
But they always get it wrong
I feel stupid when I pray
So, why am I praying anyway?
If nobody's listening

Anyone, please send me anyone
Lord, is there anyone?
I need someone, oh
Anyone, please send me anyone
Lord, is there anyone?
I need someone

I used to crave the world's attention
I think I cried too many times
I just need some more affection
Anything to get me by

A hundred million stories
And a hundred million songs
I feel stupid when I sing
Nobody's listening to me
Nobody's listening
I talk to shooting stars
But they always get it wrong
I feel stupid when I pray
Why the fuck am I praying anyway?
If nobody's listening

Anyone, please send me anyone
Lord, is there anyone?
I need someone, oh
Anyone, please send me anyone
Oh, Lord, is there anyone?
I need someone
Oh, anyone, I need anyone
Oh, anyone, I need someone

A hundred million stories
And a hundred million songs
I feel stupid when I sing
Nobody's listening to me
Nobody's listening

Demi Lovato, Anyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixVd...

* How long has it been since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

* We must all be alike.

* Firefighters who burn books are custodians of our peace of mind.

* Books say nothing.

* The world is starving and we're well fed. Is that why we're hated so much?

* I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty," but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

* Books are hated and feared because they show the pores of life.

* When you've got nothing to lose, you run any risk you want. (Reminds me of Kris Kristofferson's lyrics to Me and Bobby McGee: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.)

* Books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

* The only way the average chap will see ninety-nine percent of the world is through books.

* A little learning is a dangerous thing.

* The dignity of truth is lost without much protesting.

* Live as if you would drop dead in ten seconds. (Reminds me of Tim McGraw's song, Live Like You Were Dying: Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.)

Fahrenheit 451 is shockingly prophetic and frightening with its implications.

Highly recommend reading or re-reading it!

It probably took Ray Bradbury some courage to write Fahrenheit 451 in the middle of the McCarthy era. His novel is a book lover's nightmare inspired by all the book-burning episodes of ancient and recent history: the destruction of the library of Alexandria, the Christian auto-da-fé, the Nazi and Soviet acts of destruction of all cultural legacy that they deemed subversive.

In short, Fahrenheit 451 is about barbaric censorship, established in the name of an absolutist and nihilistic ideology, whereby any form of high culture is banned, and all sorts of mind-numbing pharmaceuticals and entertainment are promoted. Indeed, the rise of anxiolytic medications, antidepressants and mass television was a significant trend when Bradbury was writing this book; and in a way, they still are. Using value inversions just as 1984 had done before, firefighters are the ones who light up the pyres of destruction.

The story is that of a fireman who turns to the other side and decides to save the books. His escape is perhaps the most striking part of Bradbury's novel. In the end, he joins a community of dissidents where each person knows at least one book by heart, and actually is that book. There has hardly been a better metaphor for the fact that we are the books we read.

CW/TW: arson, murder, physical violence

"Stuff your eyes with wonder. [L]ive as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security. . . ."

United States of America (ca. 1990s)¹ — The times have significantly changed. People do not read books anymore; instead, they spend time excessively watching television on parlor walls. They don't walk outside to appreciate nature, for they have cars that drive so fast requiring billboards to be two hundred feet long for the passengers to read them. They don't like to think independently nor participate in meaningful conversations, as they prefer listening to music that continuously blasts from the seashell radio sets attached to their ears. However, these are far from the greatest change society has experienced.

The biggest change lies on the job of the firemen: they aren't tasked to put fires out anymore, they rather start them. Guy Montag is a fireman employed to burn outlawed books, and sometimes houses if the book owners resist to leave them. One fall night, Montag encounters his new neighbor, the carefree and gentle seventeen-year-old Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals inspired him to reflect on the emptiness of his life and his non-pursuit of happiness. As Montag ruminates about the depths of life and its meaning, he starts to do the forbidden and reads what should be left Fahrenheit 451-burning.

Ray Bradbury's 67-year-old classic Fahrenheit 451 burns still, and even brighter, in the contemporary age of social media and entertainment as it provides a timeless critique on mass media, censorship, ignorance, and restrictive political correctness.

Told in the third-person limited omniscient point-of-view following Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451 successfully manages to set a distant, seemingly disconnected proximity of the narrative that works well in amplifying the harrowing and gloomy tone of Bradbury's lyrical and descriptive prose. This allows Bradbury to accentuate the mystery of the world he created through the introduction of his protagonist as seen in the novel's opening paragraphs:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Bradbury's genius blazes with the parallels accurately envisaged by the novel on the realities experienced by the society today. As the Internet becomes more recognized as a basic need alongside the increasing mundanity of social media usage, Fahrenheit 451's fiery warning has never been warmer. Indeed, we can identify ourselves as Montag being asked by Clarisse, "Are you happy?" Does the interconnectivity the Internet and our technological advancements provide really bring us closer, making us happier or are we more prone to discord and division?

As modern society grows more obsessed with the escapist stimulation the black mirror in its hands offers, the more its members get blinded by the shallow and asinine content the media and entertainment industries provide. Our present realities may have not gone too far as to burn outlawed books, yet the congruence of this circumstance manifests in the ways we deliberately avoid seeking wisdom by harnessing the full potential of technology to effect change, specifically on the things that matter.

One controversial passage in the book highlights Bradbury's opinions on the minorities' involvement on magnifying censorship linked to the drawbacks of political correctness. Through the antagonist's speech, the author forwards how the minorities do the first step on book burning, alluding to the restrictions this obsession on political correctness does which leads to the reductionism of life's complex and pressing phenomena in the fear of being offensive and insensitive:

n  “Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. . . .

"The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. . . .

"There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”n

In the Coda of the 60th Anniversary Edition of the book, Bradbury shares his personal, direct opinions regarding the minorities:

n  The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.n

Stahl from Slate Magazine forwards that Bradbury's great literary achievements, with Fahrenheit 451 in particular, will be remembered by the liberals as a critique of the censorship of McCarthyism. On the other hand, Stahl posits that conservatives read the novel as a sole attack on political correctness. This is where I would argue that the politicization of this novel, especially when used as a political weapon to silence dissenting sides, is what Bradbury also wanted to criticize. Censorship in the form of overtly excessive imposition of political correctness and censorship in the guise of political fanaticism as a tool for discrimination and injustice both harm critical thinking by monopolizing the intricacies of the society's narratives.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 may come as an ardent critique on the pressing issues of censorship and ignorance in our modern social world. Yet, Bradbury's closing paragraphs remind us one important thing: the debate on what qualifies as a book is not limited to the print-ebook argument; because sometimes, books can be people-shaped too.

Personal Enjoyment: 4 stars
Quality of the Book: 4.2 stars
- Use of Language: ⭐⭐⭐⭐+
- Plot and Narrative Arc: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Characters: ⭐⭐⭐+
- Integrity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Message: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

AVG: 4.1 stars | RAVE

A huge thanks to my twin from the other side of the world, Shi, for buddy reading this with me!

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Note:
[1] The story is set in an undisclosed city which appears to be in the American Midwest during the year 1999 (as stated in Bradbury's Coda). However, the writing style makes it seem that it occurs in a distant future.

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[Some comments in this review are for the pre-review I posted which contained highlighted reactions from my status updates. You may check the actual status updates through the links below to understand the context behind the comments.]

Status Updates:
START | dystopian novels scare me more than horror novels do | this is us getting unverified 'facts' from social media | my younger self feels attacked | live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds | me not realizing i'm done with the novel | bradbury says that F451 is a critique to political correctness, and now i'm confused | END