Para mí, su mejor novela de ficción. Ensayos (mejores) y relatos históricos aparte.

Per vieno veikėjo principinę vidinę dramą Orvelas puikiai atspindi primygtinį kapitalizmo visuotinumą ir pinigų valdomos visuomenės ydas. Iš pažiūros, individas kaip ir laisvas, kol veikia kapitalizmo rėmuose. Kažkaip išeiti už jų -- kaip ir neįmanoma. Tiksliau, teoriškai gal ir įmanoma, bet tuomet turi atsisakyti gyventi visuomenėje ir būti visiškas atsiskyrėlis.

Gordonas bandė kažkaip suderinti savo pasišlykštėjimą kapitalizmu ir atsisakymą žaisti pagal jo taisykles su noru visavertiškai dalyvauti visuomenės gyvenime. Buvo labai sunku jausti jam empatiją, nes jo elgesys atrodė nebrandus, destruktyvus ir, rodos, visiškai nenuoseklus. Kita vertus, toks pagrindinio veikėjo vaizdavimas kaip tik sudaro realumo įspūdį ir per jį lengva pajusti situacijos beviltiškumą.

Beje, knyga labai gerai surezonavo su šiuo metu skaitoma Frommo "Pabėgti iš laisvės", kurioje nagrinėjamas keblus individo santykis su asmenine laisve.

p. 53 Gordon jau žinojo, kur jų bėda: ne tiek tai, kad jie neturi pinigų, o tai, kad neturėdami pinigų jie mintimis toliau gyvena pinigų pasaulyje - pasaulyje, kuriame pinigai yra dorybė, skurdas - nusikaltimas. Juos žlugdo ne pats skurdas, o baimė atrodyti skurdžiais. Jie pripažįsta pinigų kodeksą, ir pagal tą kodeksą jaučiasi esą nevykėliai. Jiems neužtenka proto atsikvošėti ir tiesiog pradėti ~gyventi~, su pinigais ar be jų, kaip kad gyvena žemesnės klasės. Kokios jos teisios, tos žemesnės klasės! Nukelkime kepurę prieš fabriko darbininką, kuris, gaudamas skatikus, vis užtaiso savo merginai linksmas dienas! Jo gyslomis bent jau teka kraujas, ne pinigai.

I haven't yet read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, a supposedly excellent autobiographical account of a middle-class man's descent into abject poverty, but I would imagine that some of the experiences Orwell describes in that book must have served him equally well in writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which must rank among the bleakest novels about self-induced poverty ever written in the English language.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying centres on Gordon Comstock, a talented twenty-nine-year-old writer who has renounced a successful career in advertising -- not just to get some serious writing done, but on general principle. Gordon, you see, hates money. More specifically, he hates the English middle class's slavish devotion to money and all the things it stands for. Refusing to serve the money god any longer, Gordon steps out of the rat race, only steadily to sink into poverty. In his good moments he feels morally superior to the people surrounding him, whose petit-bourgeois gentility he despises; in his bad moments he realises that he himself is despicable and that his new-found 'freedom' will never make him a successful author, as poverty (which Orwell calls 'a spiritual sewer' and 'spiritual halitosis') leads not to creativity but rather to moral deadness, which is unconducive to being either creatively or socially successful. Needless to say, the increasingly squalid and unproductive Gordon soon begins to pity and loathe himself, to the point where his self-hatred threatens to poison his relationships with the few people with whom he is still in touch. The question is: can his loved ones get him to give up his dream of a money-independent existence before it's too late?

Keep the Aspidistra Flying features some black comedy and social satire, but even so the book is fairly depressing. Orwell expertly dissects the poor man's pride and paranoia, his nagging obsessions and insecurities, and his constant struggle between hope, optimism, envy, despair and self-loathing. No doubt many readers will find Gordon a frustrating and pig-headed protagonist (he is!), but being a slightly frustrated aspiring writer myself, I could sort of relate to him -- enough to acknowledge that he's a powerful creation. I also really appreciated the urgency of Orwell's writing. Many of his ideas on capitalism and poverty are repeated with great insistence throughout the novel, meaning Keep the Aspidistra Flying is hardly a very subtle read, but definitely a compelling one. Finally, I greatly enjoyed the colourful picture Orwell paints of 1930s England, where class is everything and where splendour and squalour go hand in hand. I didn't really care for Gordon's sudden change of heart in the final chapters, which seemed a bit pat to me, but even so, Keep the Aspidistra Flying struck me as an excellent book, full of powerful observations about writing and life in general that I wish I had come up with myself.

Talk about being a frustrated writer. :-)

Scegliere il proprio sogno e condurre una vita spesso sofferta o sceglier la rassicurante prospettiva di una vita standardizzata, già tracciata, nella quale la personalità sbiadisce sino a svanire e solo rimane un sentore profondamente impersonale? Un Orwell cantore della libertà personale, delle seducenti lusinghe che la vita borghese esterna, di un conflitto che vede ognuno di noi impegnato a comprendere (e scegliere) chi realmente vuol essere. Un libro per chi sogna di scrivere, per chi sogna di poter sognare, per chi, semplicemente, sogna.

"The mistake you make, don't you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing."

I thoroughly enjoyed this little book. If you like Orwell you will love Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Significativo e visionario.

The novel is like "1984", a thesis novel. The author sets out to portray to us in great detail the monotony and smallness of Gordon's life and shows us page after page to what extent money governs every moment of the life of his "hero," despite his desperate attempt to extricate himself from the system. Suppose a form of boredom sometimes accompanies reading. In that case, insidious anguish seizes the reader when he realizes how poverty eats away at Gordon from within, at the risk of robbing him of his soul.
The reader quickly grasps the irony of the situation. By choosing to fight against money, Gordon paradoxically gets into a slump where lack of funds dictates his choices and defines him as a social, penniless friend with Ravelston and a chaste lover with Rosemary. At first glance, the novel's title, to say the least opaque, takes on its whole meaning: the aspidistra is a perennial plant, an integral part of every London household. It symbolizes a form of normality, of belonging to society. Gordon's hatred of the aspidistra, which in his eyes represents the system he refuses to be a part of, perfectly illustrates the author's chilling irony.

Gordon Comstock is a truly insufferable bore to spend time with and this book whilst not a chore to read was pretty tame and predictable in nature. Comstock's arc from anti-capitalist to middle class conformist is essentially the same argument some douchey dudebro might make about lesbians - all they need is some good dick (see Chasing Amy for a popular example of said attitude explored by somebody half sensitive to the idea that it is the moron character who spouts it) and in this examle yes, Orwell is some douchey middle class pre-war dudebro who thinks that capitalism is a wonderful thing and all socialists need is educating, or their eyes opening to the sturdy goodness, because at heart everybody is an aspidistra flying capitalist.

Comstock is what Jarvis Cocker was singing about in Common People, he truly believes that the chipstains and grease are an option for the people he is slumming with, the way he simply has a bath and goes back to middle class capitalism has its parallels with the girl who can just call her dad and get him to wire her some more cash. A dreadful human being really. That it is apparently a semiautobiographical works tells me all I need to know about Orwell and will be enough of an explanation as to why I will not read any more of his nonsense.

Give me Patrick Hamilton or Julian MacLaren-Ross any day of the week over this flim-flam.

Ένα καταπληκτικό βιβλίο που όλοι πρέπει να διαβάσουν!!!Πιο επίκαιρο απο ποτέ, γεμάτο κοινωνικούς προβληματισμούς που μας αφορούν όλους!

Oh, what an ode to the money-Gods and aspidistras. An amazing, emotional journey of one man's fight against aspidistras and the inevitable pull of the money-Gods. This is a novel that is warm, hard, depressing, funny, absurd and at the end virtuous and redeeming. He simultaneously threads the needles of commerce, class, art and protest and weaves his story with satire and pathos, but doesn't make caricatures of ANY of his characters.

I have come to genuinely hate—hate—Gordon Comstock, main character of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Though he starts out as one of those characters you might sympathize with, as you learn more about him you like him less and less. By the end of the book the one-note whiner whose problems are of his own design is one of the least likable and most cringe-inducing characters I've ever had the displeasure of coming across, and it's pretty clear to me that this wasn't intentional on George Orwell's part. Gordon drags down the entire story, perverts its intended message, and makes me dislike Orwell for publishing this failure of a book.

If you are fortunate enough to not have read Keep the Aspidistra Flying, it's necessary to explain Gordon Comstock so that you can understand how he's such an anchor around the book's neck. He is the main character, with more than 90% of the volume focused on him, and he is the most annoying piece of shit you can imagine. He rails against the “money god,” essentially the materialism of 1930s London, in every conversation. You might have read that last sentence and thought that I was being hyperbolic when I said “every conversation,” that I must have really meant it is a frequent topic of his conversations. If so, you are incorrect. If this were a novella I could give the character the benefit of the doubt and assume that he talked about other things, on occasion, but Keep the Aspidistra Flying is long enough to erase that doubt: Every rendezvous with his girlfriend Rosemary, every drink he has with his friend Ravelston, is an opportunity for Gordon to yell about the failures of capitalism, and he never lets one of those opportunities slip him by. Even when he’s on his own, Gordon has a one track mind, and that track is titled “down with the money god.”

How does Gordon’s hatred of materialism translate into action, you might be wondering? Does he become a modern day Diogenes, living on the street and forcing people to confront the absurdity of the economic system? No, he merely leaves his well paying job for a worse one so that he’s only lower-middle class, and still happily mooches off of his family (especially his long suffering sister). Gordon is in fact the money god’s most ardent worshiper: He describes himself as “damnably selfish,” is constantly proselytizing about the money god’s power, and spends all the money that comes his way as quickly as possible on materialistic vices. This combination of preachiness, hypocrisy, and general meanness make it impossible to believe that anyone would willingly spend time with him, yet Orwell gives him a friend that willingly puts up with his shitty behavior, and a love interest that is so much better than him that them being together beggars belief. Not only does she put up with his money god ranting, treating it all as a joke, but she forgives him for repeatedly treating her like garbage, mothering him when he categorically doesn’t deserve it, and the book’s ending has her willing to martyr herself to avoid forcing him to do something he’d prefer not to. She should have run away screaming early on in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but inexplicably does not.

Gordon is such a one note character, with the rest of the narrative twisting to likewise focus on his obsession with money, that the book becomes predictable. Does anyone reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying think that the day trip to the country, which Gordon has budgeted out to the last penny, will end well? Or that Gordon will behave responsibly with his extra cash when selling a story brings him a sudden windfall? Of course not, since this would fly in the face of what the book is about. This can’t be the story of Gordon being poor and things going well, which means you can accurately guess where each new piece of the novel is heading.

This predictability even extends to the book’s eventual resolution, which merits a deeper discussion. Early on in the book it’s made clear that Gordon still has an escape hatch from poverty in the form of his old job at an advertising agency. He has chosen not to use that escape hatch, making his life of poverty a voluntary one, a fact that severely undercut any sympathy I had for the character. At the end of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (spoiler, I guess, but like I said it’s utterly predictable) Gordon uses the escape hatch and returns to a job that provides a solid middle class income. Do you see how this means that the entire book lacks all but the most surface-level tension? It’s like if you read a story about how there’s a man on a desert island with a satellite phone, but he refuses to use the phone because he hates technology. Then at the end of the story he’s picked all the fruit in the island, can’t catch any more fish with his bare hands, and finally breaks down and uses the satellite phone to call for help and gets rescued. The same resolution could have happened at any earlier point in the story! The escape hatch was always there! All the times before that he didn’t use the solution to all his problems was just Orwell shoving artificial conflict down my throat, each new mouthful making me hate Gordon more and more.

Did Orwell mean to make Gordon Comstock such an unmitigated dumpster fire of a person? I don’t think so, since it guts the criticism of capitalism the book tries to make by painting it as a problem easily escaped by anyone not intentionally and repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Knowing what I know of Orwell, this simply can’t be the intended message of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which means that Orwell committed a grave error by making Gordon so terrible. There are real critiques of capitalism to be made, but they can’t be persuasively made in a book like Keep the Aspidistra Flying where its protagonist is a poster child for the idea that poverty is a choice that only the worst of society elects. You can in fact read Keep the Aspidistra Flying as incredibly pro-capitalism, not just because of despicable Gordon the anti-money god, but also because the book depicts socialism as a fad for rich people to play at without even trying to put it into practice. However, I think such a reading is contrary to the one Orwell intended. As a person who experienced the struggle of the poor and working class, Orwell cannot have intended Keep the Aspidistra Flying to be a wholehearted endorsement of capitalism, and bits of the book like the advertisements in an undertaker’s shop window showing how even death has become commodified give credit to that position. If I’m correct about that, however, it means that Orwell just really fucked up Keep the Aspidistra Flying and failed to effectively deliver the message that he intended.

You want a book about a writer struggling with poverty? Hunger by Knut Hamsun is excellent. You want an actually effective argument against capitalism in fiction form? Check out I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński. Don’t waste your time reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Orwell’s 1984 is a very good book, but Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a failure, and such a big failure that I think it ends up making the exact opposite argument that I believe Orwell intended. He should have dropped the manuscript for this one down a storm drain instead of letting it loose on the world, but alas he decided to take the money and have it published. The money god wins again. 1/5.

Girl problems, money problems, houseplant problems. Things are not going Gordon’s way. Money has become Gordon Comstock’s all-consuming idée fixe (followed closely by aspidistras). Gordon, who comes from “one of those depressing families, so common among the middle-middle classes, in which nothing ever happens,” refuses to be a slave to the “money-god.” He gives up a relatively well paying but soulless job at an advertising agency, a job that furthers the evils of the capitalism that he deplores. He instead deliberately seeks out a position in a bookshop with low pay and no hope of advancement while he struggles at writing his poetry.

At first this decision may appear noble and idealistic, but Gordon rapidly ceases to be a sympathetic character as he mooches money off of his long-suffering and far from wealthy sister and complains nonstop to everyone who will listen about both the evils of money and how difficult it is for him not to have money. As he points out, he isn’t poor enough to experience actual hardship (unlike many in the 1930s), but is poor enough that everything from socializing with friends to courting his girlfriend to writing poetry to having a cup of tea without having to hide it from the landlady is nearly impossible.

His lack of money, which is at least partially self-inflicted, becomes Gordon’s excuse for all that he has failed to achieve in his life. His endless whining is so pervasive that you want to shake him. Gordon is hardly the most charming of protagonists, but his tragic fall and relationship with his saintly girlfriend, Rosemary, are still compelling, largely due to Orwell’s vivid characterizations.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not nearly as aggressively political as Orwell’s more famous works. The novel is more concerned with interpersonal relationships, but still addresses the larger issues of capitalism, socialism, and class division in a darkly humorous manner.