It took me awhile to read through all of the comments. A great and insightful dialogue this month. Thank you, everyone! I was excited to read this early work by Orwell. I'm glad we selected it. However, like everyone else, it was slower-going than I expected since the characters were so unlikeable! I was curious how Orwell's book was received when it was published. I couldn't find any contemporaneous reviews. The best I could find was this information on Wikipedia under
Burmese Days.
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Because of concerns that the novel might be potentially libellous, that Katha was described too realistically, and that some of the characters might be based on real people, it was first published "further afield", in the United States. A British edition, with altered names, appeared a year later. When it was published in the 1930s, Orwell's harsh portrayal of colonial society was felt by "some old Burma hands" to have "rather let the side down". In a letter from 1946, Orwell said "I dare say it's unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen".
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I wanted to share that I am half-way through the audiobook version of Emma Larkin's
Finding George Orwell in Burma, a political travelogue from an expat-American journalist that traces George Orwell's life in Southeast Asia. It has been an interesting companion to last month's selection. Here is the description from Goodreads.
Spoiler:
Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, also known as Myanmar, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!"
In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written.
The following article on "Orwell, Kipling and Empire" is also quite interesting.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the...ng-and-empire/
It has links to essays that Orwell wrote about Kipling. Orwell referred to him as the "good bad poet" and said:
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For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him.
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Emma Larkin in her book discusses Orwell and Kipling and makes a point of comparing this impression to the dates & ages of Orwell's time in Burma (1922-1927, 19-24 years)
I was curious to find photos of what Burma is like. Here are a few travel articles that follow Orwell's steps in Burma that I enjoyed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/t-...e-orwell.html#
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2...-burma-myanmar
And, lastly, The Orwell Society is a registered charity in the UK with the objective "to promote an understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell (1903-1950)," and I had fun exploring their website. Here is a link.
http://www.orwellsociety.com/home/