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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

George orwell, , compiled and with an intro. by george packer. . harcourt, $25 (308pp) isbn 978-0-15-101361-6.

Reviewed on: 08/25/2008

Genre: Nonfiction

Paperback - 336 pages - 978-0-15-603313-8

Paperback - 528 pages - 978-0-436-20538-5

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George Orwell

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

14 October 2009

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‘Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays’ by George Orwell, and ‘All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays’ by George Orwell

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Facing Unpleasant Facts

Narrative Essays

George Orwell

Compiled and with an Introduction by George Packer

Harcourt: 308 pp., $25

All Art Is Propaganda

Critical Essays

Compiled by George Packer and with an Introduction by Keith Gessen

Harcourt: 374 pp., $25

It’s a source of no small irony to read George Orwell’s essays in the closing days of this election season -- although not for the reasons one might expect. Sure, there have been plenty of Orwellian turns these last few months (a Washington insider running as an agent of change, political rallies reminiscent of the Two Minutes Hates from “1984”). But for all that, the presidential race remains less ideological than pragmatic as each candidate tries to lay claim to the center ground.

Even more, it oversimplifies Orwell to boil down his sensibilities to sound bites, to the allegorical starkness of “Animal Farm” or “1984.” Nearly 59 years after his death of tuberculosis at age 46, Orwell’s legacy now seems shackled by those novels, his restless intellect reduced to slogans: “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength,” “Big Brother is watching you.”

For Orwell, “Animal Farm” and “1984” were distillations; written late in his career, they represent a summing up. Far more fundamental is how he came to their perspective, how the worldview they portray arose. Like many of his books, they have roots in the pieces he contributed, beginning in the early 1930s, to newspapers, anthologies and journals -- essays, columns, criticism, observations, the efforts of a working writer, which, more than anything, is what he was.

“Orwell’s writing began with essays, and his essays began with his experience,” notes George Packer in his introduction to “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.” “Before ‘Burmese Days’ there was ‘A Hanging,’ and before ‘A Hanging’ there were ‘five boring years within the sound of bugles’ as a colonial policeman in Burma. Before ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ there was ‘The Spike,’ and before ‘The Spike’ there were months spent incognito as a dishwasher and tramp. In ‘Why I Write’ Orwell reports that he wanted to be a writer from ‘perhaps the age of five or six,’ but it was only in the hard, self-inflicted experiences of his twenties and thirties -- imperialism, poverty, coal mines and miners, the Spanish civil war -- that his power as a writer was forged.”

“Facing Unpleasant Facts” is one of a new two-volume set, compiled by Packer, gathering many of Orwell’s essays; the other is “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays.” Taken together, these books reaffirm the author’s status as one of the definitive essayists in English literature. This is hardly a new assessment, but it’s worth restating, especially at a moment when Orwell’s achievement -- to state directly, and in plain language, what he thought and experienced -- seems like the most radical of notions, a political and aesthetic stance so unfiltered as to be naive. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” he wrote in a 1946 column dissecting cultural truisms, and that’s as good a summing up of his perspective as you’re likely to find.

Courage of his convictions

Whether he’s discussing the dangers of totalitarianism or framing an unlikely defense of English cooking, Orwell stands by the courage of his convictions, even if that means criticizing friends like Stephen Spender for not being sufficiently political or taking on the intellectual left (of which he was a member) for its inability to understand realpolitik. “Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started,” he writes in the 1941 piece “England Your England.” “ . . . [U]nderlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia -- their severance from the common culture of the country.”

A related idea emerges in “Inside the Whale,” the landmark critical essay published in 1940. “With all its injustices,” Orwell writes, “England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. . . . To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”

This is a key point, one to which Orwell returns consistently; it is his literary anima. In “Why I Write,” (1946) he makes the case explicitly: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. . . . The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” He’s right, of course, and yet, in such a statement lies the seeds of his being misunderstood. It’s the same effect as “Animal Farm” and “1984” -- to make Orwell seem like a polemicist rather than, as he puts it, someone who has “a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.”

What Orwell’s after is less diatribe than dialogue. In his writing, politics and literature are in constant conversation, framing reactions to what he has lived through, what he has read. Throughout these essays, we are confronted with his humanism, which, as much as his intellect, motivates his work. This emerges most clearly in his personal essays, although as Packer notes, these “could not be farther from the kind of autobiographical writing that has been fashionable over the past ten or fifteen years, in which a writer puts the reader under the spell of pure novelistic storytelling, all emotional vibration without an insight anywhere.”

For Orwell, it was all about the details

For Orwell, the key is clear-eyed observation; “[O]ne can write nothing readable,” he suggests, “unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.” It’s about the smallest details: the condemned man sidestepping a puddle on his way to the gallows in “A Hanging,” the sight of a dead German -- a dead human -- in “Revenge Is Sour” that drives home “the meaning of war.”

In “How the Poor Die,” Orwell describes the death of a fellow patient in the public ward of a Paris hospital. “There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old,” he writes. “One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old.”

There’s a certain wishful air to be inferred here; Orwell published “How the Poor Die” in 1946, less than four years before he, too, died in a hospital. Again this illustrates his transparency as a writer, the clarity of his vision and his voice. Such qualities mark the 50 essays here, which range from the well-known -- “Shooting an Elephant,” “Politics and the English Language,” “Such, Such Were the Joys” -- to the offhand, and share a pragmatic directness, a willingness to see things as they are. “What is really at issue,” he writes in “The Prevention of Literature,” “is the right to report contemporary events truthfully or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.”

Yes, indeed, that’s it exactly, not just for Orwell but for all of us.

Ulin is book editor of The Times.

[email protected]

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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays Hardcover – 13 oktober 2008

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• ISBN-10 0151013616
• ISBN-13 978-0151013616
• Editie Eerste editie
• Uitgever Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publicatiedatum 13 oktober 2008
• Taal Engels
• Afmetingen 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• Printlengte 308 pagina's
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GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER  is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

GEORGE ORWELL (19031950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

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• Uitgever ‏ : ‎ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Eerste editie (13 oktober 2008)
• Taal ‏ : ‎ Engels
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 308 pagina's
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0151013616
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0151013616
• Afmetingen ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm

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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays Hardcover – 13 Oct. 2008

• ISBN-10 0151013616
• ISBN-13 978-0151013616
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date 13 Oct. 2008
• Language English
• Dimensions 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• Print length 308 pages
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About the author.

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER  is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

GEORGE ORWELL (19031950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (13 Oct. 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 308 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0151013616
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0151013616
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• 22,033 in Essays, Journals & Letters

About the author

George orwell.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays (Complete Works of George Orwell) Hardcover – Import, 13 October 2008

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• ISBN-10 0151013616
• ISBN-13 978-0151013616
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date 13 October 2008
• Language English
• Dimensions 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• Print length 308 pages
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Product description

About the author.

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER  is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

GEORGE ORWELL (19031950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (13 October 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 308 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0151013616
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0151013616
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 499 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm

About the author

George orwell.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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Essays by the author of 1984. George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected-and illuminated-the fraught times in which he lived. Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these essays weave together the personal and the political ...

"[R]emembrances of working in a bookshop [to] recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War..."

- Publishers Weekly

"As soon as he began to write something, it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge-in short, to think-as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent."

- George Packer