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Sto caricando le informazioni... A clergyman's daughter (edizione 2000)di George Orwell
Informazioni sull'operaLa figlia del reverendo di George Orwell
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. he second of Orwell's published novels. As in the first (Burmese Days) the reader is confronted with the total powerlessness of the lead character. It is tough reading the life of a person unable to make choices. Dorothy is a Rector's unmarried daughter, and her life choices seem to have all been made for her. Life is a grind, and there are decades of it to come. The plot is spiced up by a plot twist detour into penury and street living - but choices remained a distant prospect. I'm enjoying the reading, but if Orwell hadn't written Animal Farm and 1984, I think both he and his other fiction would have been forgotten by now. Orwell notoriously categorised his own novel as "bollocks" in a letter to Henry Miller shortly after its publication — you can see his point, but Orwell even on a bad day still has something. The outer sections of the book may be rather routine and forgettable, but the hop-picking chapter is powerful stuff, and even the slightly clumsy James Joyce pastiche in the Trafalgar Square section manages to be quite effective from time to time. Orwell is able to write with conviction when he's talking about living rough, although there's a lot of overlap with Down and out in Paris and London, of course. (The school chapter is also clearly based on personal experience, but oddly enough doesn't work as well: Orwell just comes across as too bitter to be convincing.) So it's not a total waste of time, but the whole thing doesn't really mesh together to make a working novel. Probably because Orwell was weak enough let Dorothy be plucked out of poverty by a fairy godfather, as we knew she ought to be, but then couldn't force himself to write a romantic happy-end, so that we're left high and dry between cold pessimism and rosy optimism, not knowing where we are meant to be...
Orwell holds an acid pen and that can often be very intriguing. The book does contain some reference to race and creed, so this is one side of Orwell's writing that some may find unsavoury. Orwell also touches on mental health issues as Dorothy endures her nervous breakdown. It is an interesting if sometimes slightly grim story and at the end we are left to draw our own conclusions about the principal character. Maybe many would consider this as one of Orwell's lesser works but it does have meaning and substance and I am sure that the book has parts where Orwell meant to unsettle his readers. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiPenguin Books (1877)
Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.912Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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It does seem that Orwell got a good ways into this book and decided he wanted to write an entirely different sort of novel than it had been becoming up to that point. What begins as a fairly straight-forward satire on Christianity (especially Anglicanism) and provincialism abruptly becomes by turns a sort of mystery story, a proto-Grapes of Wrath, and then tries on some Dickensian dressing (David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Hard Times), almost dropping into a sort of Stand and Deliver/Dangerous Minds plot of "underprivileged kids make good academically," adding a bit of satire on non-conformist (fundamentalist) Christianity for good measure. The whole thing ends with a return to the state of things at the beginning of the novel, but with the heroine irrevocably changed inwardly.
Structurally--formally, I'm not sure what to make of it. Somehow it feels as though all of the elements of the novel (the prose itself, characterization, plot, etc.) are perfect but somehow mismatched. Nevertheless, it was (for me) one of those rarest of books that are enjoyable to read, mercifully short (one doesn't always want epics--even me--and one does tire of novels overly long by virtue of having been serialized), and still manage to leave one with a feeling of both intellectual stimulation and a certain blessing of goodwill from author to reader. ( )