Orwell, always timeless

The purpose of the book of Simon Leys is not to explain or make a tiresome exegesis of the thought of Orwell (who are also not needed). It is not a biography (she has already been done in a big way by Bernard Crick). So what?
It is simply to explain the case Orwell. This unique individual and full of exciting contradictions who fought all his life not for an abstract ideal but rather to a certain idea of ​​justice. Nothing predisposed to Orwell starting to become one of the most prolific thinkers in concept and critical finesse of socialism of the twentieth century. Rare are the personalities that had not fallen into the arcana of totalitarianism where willful blindness in the face of the crimes of communism. Alongside Orwell could easily put Simone Weil, Rosa Luxembourg where Guy Debord later.
Simon Leys attempt to explain the political commitment of the character. And therefore also its paradoxes: man after the petty bourgeois middle class but downgraded, Orwell always wanted to get a place among the most miserable, voluntarily putting in impossible situations and even up to play comedy for acceptance in these poor areas. His commitment is also reflected physically in the field during the Spanish war and the fight against fascism with the added betrayal of communists. This is also the event which will mark arguably the awareness of Orwell that real socialism is possible and not utopian. Experience he do during the town of Barcelona in 1937.
The survey of workers Wigan pier and social injustice that meeting there will also be a shock to him, it is certainly here that he developed his concept of "common decency" shared by ordinary people. Orwell's lifetime is based on this paradox: the story of a grown man and end that would have wanted to be proletarian. Orwell Looks almost apologizes for not getting out of the filth misery, as if he had a debt to pay or to expiate original sin.

Orwell was therefore a genuine thinker who was practicing his convictions on the ground, a thousand miles of new rebellocrates Mélanchoniens son or dad antifa from Science-po.

The book of Leys is probably not what you can find better on Orwell, but it is a nice and short introduction. Nothing obviously reading and replaces the direct return to the text of the author of 1984. biography, indispensable work is that of Bernard Crick. Michéa wrote two interesting books on Orwell entitled "Orwell: Tory anarchist" and "Orwell educator."