This review includes spoilers, you've been forewarned.
A future in my past written in a distant past. What an amazing book. Orwell's writing has lasted near perfectly (i.e. modern and in context) some 70 years later (which frankly blows my mind).
A future in my past written in a distant past. What an amazing book. Orwell's writing has lasted near perfectly (i.e. modern and in context) some 70 years later (which frankly blows my mind).
The story breaks into three parts as we make our way into Winston's mind. Part 1 reads like I'm learning around his world and how he experiences it. The mundane work, the acceptance of his role, whilst he secretly scratches his mind back.
In part 2, I feel like I'm taking into Winston's heart as he re-experiences the world and the life and love that still exists in it. I loved some of the expressions and sadness that came with those expressions. Such as Winston knowing that what he was doing was against the "rules", and that it was simply an inevitability of being caught and tortured.
He believes that he's given up his body already to the world of 1984, and when the Thought Police catch him, they'll take his mind, and so long as he protects his heart, he'll live on.
Part 3 is mostly from inside of Winston's mind, as O'Brian works firstly to break Winston's mind, but then puts it back together in The Party's form. The place that O'Brian (and thusly The Party) comes from is entirely bleak and worse, believable in my own reality today.
O'Brian utters phrases like:
Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
Bleak.
Eventually, there's no winning. There's no happy ending. There never could be. Winston's heart is pierced, he's made to love Big Brother, and only then, when he's fully remade in The Party's eyes, does it end. For him, and for us.
7 Highlight(s)
She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?
There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.
The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.
You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere.
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'