by George Orwell
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Product Description
Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. He is determined to stay free of the “money world” of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind of security symbolized by the homely aspidistra plant that sits in every middle-class British window.
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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. --Daniel Hintzsche
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 1984's Little Brother, 2008-08-22
This is "1984" through cocercion (by the Money God) not through Big Brother's strong arm tactics. The character's journey (bleak as in "Crime in Punishment") wonderfully exemplifies this quote from the book. "If he (devil) baited his traps with yachts and racehorses, tarts and champagne, how easy it would be to dodge him. It is when he gets at you through your sense of decency that he finds you helpless."
I would have given it 5 stars but Orwell dwelt on too many unnecessary details. The book could have started from Chapter Five, and the main themes would have been intact without skipping a beat. And his repeated line about the circumcision, which comes out of nowhere several times, was a mystery to me.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Not that interesting, 2008-07-09
It seems from other reviewers that this book was quite well-liked. I unfortunately cannot echo that sentiment.
I am a great fan of Orwell and love his prose. I have read his essays and novels (both old and new) with pleasure. Of everything I've read by him this I least enjoyed.
The novel's hero, Gordon Comstock, I find rather pathetic. He decides at a young age that he will be free of the "money god" and not accept a "good job." In so doing he willfully subjects himself to a life of poverty as a starving artist working at a bookstore. I have no sympathy for the character. If he were actually destitute and had no way out I would, but that is not the case. He chooses to be poor and then complains about it. The irony is he becomes more a slave to money by shunning it than he would had he accepted it. To Gordon I say get a life and stop complaining.
Aside from not liking the main character I also did not care for the writing. All the story does is go on and on and on about how money is necessary for everything. After about a 100 pages of this I didn't care anymore. After 150 pages of this I couldn't continue reading. Maybe the end is good but I will never know.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Kneel to the Money God!, 2008-05-05
Gordon Comstock is not a very pretty sight. He's over thirty, moth-eaten, and doesn't much care for people. He's chucked up a "good" job at an advertising firm for a low-paying, dead-end position at a bookstore, and spends his evenings alone in his depressing rented room, scribbling poetry nobody reads. He never has enough money for cigarettes, the pawnshop owns most of his clothing, and his girlfriend won't sleep with him. He hates British corporate culture like poison, but ridicules the only real alternative, Socialism, at every opportunity. He's angry and apathetic, but mostly, just pathetic.
Gordon is introduced as the "last hope" of a decayed middle-class family who has spent its last farthing sending him to a snotty public school in the hopes he will "make good" and redeem the bankrupt family fortune. Unfortunately, all the high-minded Gordon wants to do is write poetry, a financial dead-end if ever there was one. After graduation, Gordon achieves success as a blurb-writer for an ad firm, but despises the work so much that he quits and "declares war on money", his euphemism for deliberately living in a quasi-poverty he feels will free his soul from all materialistic considerations and allow him to concentrate on his art. Of course it achieves just the opposite - Gordon's clothing is frayed, he's always cold and hungry and bored and tobaccoless, he has almost no friends and discovers that poverty is so mentally deadening he can no longer write poetry. He wallows in self-pity, misery, and an impotent anger towards everything around him, but refuses to bow to "the money god" and resume his decent-paying job. That is, until a situation arises with his long-suffering girlfriend Rosemary that forces him to make a choice - live out his life in "honest" poverty, or sell out his principles and become a "constipated office boy" in bowler hat and umbrella. Which will Gordon choose, and, more importantly, will the choice make him happy?
Such is KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, a merciless and highly entertaining examination of middle-class poverty in 1930s England, based partially on author George Orwell's own experiences. Actually, ASPIDISTRA wears many different hats, examining not merely what it means to be poor when you've been raised with middle-class expectations, but also the relationship between money and happiness, as well as a scourging look at the creative mentality, which, being creative himself, Orwell must have truly enjoyed. ASPIDISTRA is arguably Orwell's best novel aside from 1984. Anyone creative - writer, actor, painter, comedian, singer/musician - will identify with Gordon and his unweildy, self-serving, and yet honest principles so completely that there are times you feel Orwell has written the book for you specifically. More importantly, however, Orwell raises important and more-relevant-than-ever questions about the nature of capitalism - not its morality or immortality as such, but the effect it has had on human nature, where the pressure to "make good" forces not merely Gordon but everyone to either consciously sell themselves to the system or make a futile stand against it.
19 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
 You can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it, 2008-04-23
After recently reading the 4 volume set of the essays, plus Coming Up for Air, which I found in my shelf unread, I had thought that the Aspidistra would be the closing session on Orwell for me. I thought I had covered the field. Unfortunately and surprisingly, the aspidistra are so fresh and enjoyable, despite their sordid subject, that I find myself under compulsive pressure to order the books that I have not read yet (the Clergyman's Daughter, the Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London).
As much as I like to look at plants, assuming they grow wild or they are cultivated by somebody else, I am no gardener nor botanist. I honestly did not know what an aspidistra is. I looked it up in the Langenscheid's Dictionary English - German. I learned that an aspidistra is an Aspidistra. Aha. Google Images teach me that the thing is a somewhat non-descript and somewhat unkempt pot plant. It seems to like growing in places that no self-respecting plant ought to survive. Orwell's novel has them as a symbol for undestructability under nasty circumstances.
For the novel's hero Gordon Comstock, they are the enemy. They are allied with the oppressors, the seedy boarding houses and lower middle class dwellings that he loathes so much. They symbolize the lack of money; money rules, specifically when you don't have any.
The twist of the 'plot' is that Gordon chose to be poorer than he needed to be, by throwing away 'good jobs' in the money making world. We have here a study in the pretensions of poverty.
The most brillant parts of this amazing novel have us watch confrontations, or should I say Pas-de-Deux, of different social strata. Gordon tries to hide and is ashamed of his poverty, while his friend Ravelston is trying to hide and is ashamed of his wealth. The rich man is the socialist, who tries and tries to convince the poor man of the merits of socialism. Gordon can't be bothered, he doesn't have enough money to be a socialist.
The novel is far exceeding my expectations and I may have to think again about my classification of Orwell as mainly an essayist.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Chase vons Review of Keep The Aspidistra Flying!!!, 2008-04-21
George Orwell had already proven to me he was a genius with 1984. He further solidified that with Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London... And Keep The Aspidistra Flying only convinced me more of his remarkable genius!!!
I enjoyed this book as much if not more than all the others I've read by him!!! No one to date that I've read has been able to write in such a manner as this man and if he hadn't have written 1984 I would still consider the works I have read genius, and because he wrote 1984 as well, a genius who was also blessed with the gift of prophesy! As for the book, I felt as if I saw each of the characters because they were described so vividly...
And quite often I found myself laughing out loud at his description of things from "D'you know what your eyes look like, chappie?" he added to Gordon. "They look as if they'd been taken out and poached." "I was drunk last night," said Gordon, his head between his hands. "I gathered something of the kind, old chappie."
The premise of waging war on the "Money World" is something I had no idea would be so humorous but Orwell, true to form, takes something so serious and laces it with profound truths, and intertwines both comical satire and seriousness and all things under the sun into a master piece that only he can create! I could say more but I am off to find another one of his works so I can read more from this truly remarkably gifted soul!
As with all the books I've read by Orwell, was truly sorry to see it end...
Your Chance to Hear The Last Panther Speak
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