Down And Out In Paris And London

Είναι αυτό το καλύτερο βιβλίο του Όργουελ; Μάλλον όχι, αφού μιλάμε για τον συγγραφέα του ‘’1984’’ και της ‘’Φάρμας των Ζώων’’.
Είναι αυτό ένα βιβλίο που κλείνοντάς το νιώθεις πως έχεις πάει ένα βήμα παραπέρα την σκέψη σου, έχεις καλλιεργήσει την κοινωνική σου ενσυναίσθηση και έχεις πάρει απαντήσεις σε ερωτήσεις (δυστυχώς ορμώμενες από προκαταλήψεις) που είχες και εσύ ο ίδιος; Σίγουρα ναι.

Όταν θα είστε σε ένα βιβλιοπωλείο, αν τύχει και ξεφυλλίσετε το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο, ρίξτε μια ματιά στα κεφάλαια 22, 36 και 38. Όλες οι περιγραφές της αθλιότητας, των στερήσεων, τη βρωμιάς, της φτώχειας, του εξευτελισμού, της εκμετάλλευσης και της εξαθλίωσης που περιγράφονται στο βιβλίο αποσκοπούν στην διατύπωση των προβληματισμών που αναπτύσσονται σε αυτά τα κεφάλαια.

Πρόκειται για μια ιδιαίτερη μείξη δημοσιογραφικής έρευνας, ημερολογιακής καταγραφής, αυτοβιογραφικών στοιχείων και κοινωνικού σχολιασμού. Ο Όργουελ περιπλανιέται στο Παρίσι και το Λονδίνο του Μεσοπολέμου, την περίοδο που η ανεργία θερίζει, και παρέα με άλλους εξαθλιωμένους από τη φτώχεια συνοδοιπόρους του, πασχίζει να εξασφαλίσει κάθε βράδυ ένα κατάλυμα να κοιμηθεί, πολλές φορές μένοντας νηστικός για ως και πέντε μέρες και υποφέροντας ανυπέρβλητες στερήσεις.

Πολιτισμένος λαός δεν είναι αυτός που ακούει όπερα, διαβάζει ψαγμένα βιβλία, ψυχαγωγείται βλέποντας ταινίες του Ταραντίνο και του Κιούμπρικ και συγκινείται από πίνακες και έργα τέχνης στις γκαλερί, αλλά ένας λαός του οποίου το πιο φτωχό στρώμα ζει σε ανθρώπινες συνθήκες, με αξιοπρέπεια και χωρίς να στιγματίζεται σαν επαίτης.

Εκ πρώτης όψεως μοιάζει με ένα άχαρο βιβλίο (πόσο γοητευτικό μπορεί να είναι ένα βιβλίο που πραγματεύεται τη φτώχια και την εξαθλίωση;!), όμως κλείνοντάς το προβληματίζεσαι και μένεις να αναρωτιέσαι πόσο εύκολα η τύχη όλων μας μπορεί να αλλάξει από τη μια μέρα στην άλλη. Όπως λέει και ο Μακεδόνας στο γνωστό τραγούδι :
‘’…Γι' αυτό κάτσε καλά
κοίτα λίγο χαμηλά
η ζωή κατρακυλάει, μη λες πολλά’’.

Κλείνω με ένα απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο που αποτελεί τροφή για (πολλή) σκέψη:

‘’Πράγματι, αν φροντίζει κανείς να μην ξεχνά ότι ο αλήτης δεν είναι παρά μόνο ένας άνεργος Άγγλος, που ο νόμος τον αναγκάζει να ζει περιπλανώμενος, τότε ο <<αλήτης-τέρας>> πάει περίπατο. Δεν ισχυρίζομαι βεβαίως ότι οι περισσότεροι αλήτες είναι ιδανικοί χαρακτήρες. Υποστηρίζω απλώς ότι είναι φυσιολογικές ανθρώπινες υπάρξεις και ότι, αν είναι χειρότεροι από άλλους ανθρώπους, αυτό είναι αποτέλεσμα και όχι αιτία του τρόπου ζωής που ζουν. Συνεπώς, η αντίληψη <<τα θελαν και τα παθαν>>, με την οποία αντιμετωπίζονται συνήθως οι αλήτες, δεν είναι πιο δίκαιη απ’ ότι θα ήταν απέναντι σε ανάπηρους ή ασθενείς’’.

المتشرد يتشرد ، لا بسبب انه يحب التشرد ، و إنما للسبب نفسه الذي جعل السيارة تلتزم اليسار ، لأن ثمت قانون يلزمها بذلك

في تلك اليوميات بين البؤساء الفرنسيين و المتشردين الانجليز ثمت وصفا تفصيليا ودقيقا لحياتهم اليومية يبتعد جدا عن الملل ويصل لكمال الامتاع ، ينبش جوهر تلك الارواح المرهقة ، ويسدد سهام نقده للمجتمع و النظام و المؤسسات الدينية ، فخلف تلك الاوساخ و القذارة طاقة مهدرة في جسد مرهق ��روح مسالمة

هل عمل الغاسل ضروري للحضارة؟ ,لدينا شعور بأنه يجب أن يكون عملا شريفا لانه شاق وكريه ، ولأننا جعلنا من العمل اليدوي نوعا من الصنم ، نشاهد رجلا يقطع شجرة ، فنقول إنه يسد حاجة اجتماعية ، لمجرد انه استعمل عضلاته ، ولا يخطر ببالنا انه قطع شجرة جميلة فقط ليهيء مكانا لتمثال شنيع ، أظن الامر ينطبق على غاسل الصحون ، إنه يكسب خبزه بعرق جبينه ، لكن لا يستتبع ذلك انه كان يؤدي عملا نافعا ، ربما كان يديم ترفا هو في الغالب ليس ترفا

نمی‌تونم حرف‌ها و احساساتم رو جمع کنم تا یه ریویوی درست حسابی بنویسم...

فقط همین رو بگم که اورول با بولدوزر از روی اون تصور زیبا و کیوتی که از زندگی توی پاریس و لندن داشتم رد شد.

My first foray into Orwell's non-fiction. A harsh insight into life on the breadline in two major cities, Paris and London. Orwell's view of Paris kind of reminded me of the Paris portrayed in the film La Haine. That may sound odd but in La Haine the director purposely didn't show any of the "touristy" parts of Paris (i.e. the Eiffel Tour and the Arc de Triomphe). Orwell does this as well, he shows Paris as it really was, a slum. I admire this portrayal. There are no rose-tinted spectacles in this book.

Note to self: Try to never ever become homeless.

“The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?”

This is one of the main reasons I read: to let an author take me someplace I can’t (or in this case wouldn’t want to) go on my own. In this short volume, Orwell takes us to a place we all need to go--a place we repeatedly turn our eye from--and he makes us look.

It’s Paris and London in the late 1920’s, and the story’s narrator gives us an account of life for men who are very poor, often homeless, and chronically hungry. It’s a story filled with grit and the veracity that only lived experience can provide.

Can you imagine the highpoint in your day being dried bread and a bitter cup of water mixed with tea dust? Your cherished tobacco consisting of what you have saved from cigarette butts found in the street? Paying for a sleeping room for “vagrants,” only to find it had no bed? Watching your fellow-travelers suffer without care from debilitating diseases? Seeing your friends starve and being unable to do anything to help them?

Of course all of this is horrible, but most of the people our narrator meets are resourceful, scrappy, and full of ideas about what is important in life and how to survive. The tone the story takes is the surprising hopefulness of the downtrodden.

“Tomorrow we shall find something, mon ami, I know it in my bones. The luck always changes.”

Orwell not only puts a human face on poverty, but he also demonstrates how easy it is to get in a bad place and how difficult it is, once there, to get out of it. Even when a person has the good fortune to find work, he shows us the often unnecessary demands put on menial workers, and just how great a toll those demands can extract.

All of this is, unfortunately, still quite true.

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised … A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.”

Must-read Orwell but for different reasons from those other two classics we all know.

Firstly, Down and Out in Paris is the original expat epic!

Down and Out in London is surely down and out, damn does it ever get bad times...

Also, the treatises on class are very Orwell. Society should read and reflect, and still as timely as ever.

An important literary work all should read.

George Orwell is a damn good writer. Sure, he whipped out 1984 and Animal Farm, but it's from his essays and nonfiction that I'm learning Orwellian tricks--and by that I mean, the very best sort of craft points.

Yes, I know that his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) is characterized as a novel--usually with some qualifier like "semi-autobiographical" or "thinly-veiled." But given that Orwell saves several chapters for his personal commentary about, among others, the life of a Paris plongeur, London slang and swearing, tramps, sleeping options for the homeless in London, and the Salvation Army, it seems a stretch to me to use the word "novel." I understand his book to, at most, have about as much inevitable fudging as a memoir.

DOPL is about exactly that--Orwell mired in poverty, looking for work or working 17-hour shifts in hellfire hot hotel kitchens, begging, pawning, banding together with others in the same state, starving, and generally fighting to survive.

The temptation would be to lay it all out there--"This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened....." Orwell doesn't fall for it. Rather, he uses anecdotes proportionally: the shorter ones add scope and breadth to what might otherwise be read as an individualized experience; longer ones push the narrative forward; still longer ones fundamentally shape Orwell's experiences and opinions. With narrative intention for each sub-story, Orwell keeps the book from being a diary-esque dumping ground for every interesting thing that happened to him. He allows each story only as much it needs to serve its textual purpose. Given proper weight, the story of the weeping cook in the bad restaurant is as compelling as that of Boris, the former Russian army captain now sleeping in bug-infested sheets in the slums--even though we spend significantly more time with Boris than the cook.

What's the point? Why wouldn't a diary-esque series of observations be just as compelling? If DOPL took this travelogue route, it'd still have worth. But because Orwell takes pains to shape a narrative, one with continuity even when he leaps into another country and set of characters midway through, readers are prepared for the chapters when Orwell's first-person narrator turns discursive.

Why don't we resent the narrator for getting all political on us in the midst of a good story? Orwell refrains from opining in scene, saving it up for discursive chapters placed at natural pauses. The first discourse doesn't appear until the narrator is transitioning between Paris and London. We readers want to reflect before we make that leap; otherwise, it'd be too abrupt. The discourse actually builds tension, because while we know the narrator is steaming towards London, with one chance to pull himself out of dire straights, he's not there yet. The discursive chapter delays the resolution and heightens suspense.

And finally, Orwell's plain-language voice is a stay against the resentment we might feel for a pontificating narrator. "For what they are worth I want to give my opinions on the Paris plongeur. ..." Nothing high and mighty in that tone; our guard drops. Rather than riddiling his commentary with adjectives, adverbs, and other grammatical efforts towards artificial emphasis, Orwell puts his money on nouns: facts, observations, and general good sense.

Which means he's following his own advice, from the essay he'd later write titled "Politics and the English Language." Not that I'm one for artifical emphasis, but it's only one of the best essays ever written, ever.

n  n
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I was inspired to read this book after picking up and enjoying A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway, which was a beautifully written memoir of living in Paris as a broke writer in the 1920s. I didn't even think I liked Hemingway as an author until I read that book and was totally blown away by the vivid descriptions of the "lost generation" working on many of their n  magna opera that would make them famous-- in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, posthumously so. DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON is Orwell's memoir of being a broke writer in the 1930s and it is... well, vivid, yes, but not in the fun way. More like in the visceral doom-scrolling way that so many of us are accustomed to in Our Year 2021.



There are two parts to this book. It opens with Paris, which in some ways does glamorize poverty, I feel. Or maybe that's just because Paris is more livable to those in dire straits. He paints comical portraits of his landlords and fellow tenants, and of his co-workers at the hotel at which he worked as a dishwasher. This was my favorite portion of the book because it feels the most light-hearted-- he has some cunning observations on the poor versus the rich, on the hypocrisies of society, and a few cunning tips on how to even the odds as someone who has the odds stacked against them. Unfortunately, this is also the part of the book that is rife with antisemitism. Given the time at which this was published, it was not shocking to excuse it, but the zeitgeist does not excuse the fact that many of his comments would be wholly inappropriate today, even if it makes it easier to understand why he says and thinks the things he does. Apparently, Orwell came to question many of his harmful beliefs later in life in his journals (he was an ardent diarist) and if that is the case, it is glad news, because history is filled with creators who have messed up some way ethically and rather than introspect and seek to be better people, they have simply doubled-down and closed their ears.



The London portion, as others have pointed out, is much starker and far more grim. There is a description of a lodging house that is truly horrifying. The characters he meets in this portion are also interesting but I feel like they didn't have the verve of the people he met in the Paris portion, and Orwell himself seems so much more exhausted here. The work is harsher and less forgiving, people seem so much more jaded, the conditions are draconian, etc. I also found it to be more repetitive and skimmed some portions, although I did like his chapter where he lists out some of the "cant" he observed among people working the streets, and meditates on slang, appropriated words, and Cockney dialect.



Whether you like or hate Orwell (and there are reasons to feel either way), I think this is a fascinating insight into his life, and there were several events that seemed to inspire his two major works, 1984 and Animal Farm (particularly his observations on how the working class is exploited and basically worked to the bone while the rich pretend to care but don't). The first portion of the book is like hearing about that one "bro" friend of yours recount travel to a questionable location while staying in a dangerous hostel. The second portion of the book is like hearing about that same "bro" friend recounting a terrible ordeal. The tonal shift between the two portions is noticeable and even though it affected my reading, it really made the book feel raw and real in a way that some of these literary figures sometimes don't because so much time has passed that their personalities feel removed from their work.



Anyone who enjoys edgy memoirs or learning more about literary figures will enjoy this.



3 to 3.5 starsn