Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

Hardcover, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

809

Genres

Collections

Your library, Colorado

Publication

MJF Books. (2002), Hardcover

Description

"In this trenchant critical essay, Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. In his emulative and contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem. Answering both the detractors and the false claimants, Hitchens tears down the facade of sainthood erected by the hagiographers and rebuts the critics point by point. He examines Orwell and his perspectives on fascism, empire, feminism, and Englishness, as well as his outlook on America, a country and culture towards which he exhibited much ambivalence."--Jacket.

Media reviews

London Review of Books

It is not easy to write a good book about Orwell now. He has been written about so extensively, and sometimes well, that to justify devoting a whole book to him one would really need to have discovered some new material or be able to set him in some new context (not that this will deter publishers

eager to cash in on his centenary). The main problem with Orwell’s Victory is that Hitchens doesn’t have enough to say about Orwell to fill a book, so he writes, in effect, as Orwell’s minder, briskly seeing off various characers who have in some way or other got him wrong. This is the structuring principle for a series of chapters on ‘Orwell and Empire’, ‘Orwell and the Left’, ‘Orwell and the Right’ and so on. Some of the offenders clearly deserve what they get, but there’s something repetitive and relentless about it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing.

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Why Evolution Is True

My verdict: it’s worth a read, but only if you a) like Christopher Hitchens and, more important, b) have read a lot of Orwell.

User reviews

LibraryThing member fourbears

I love George Orwell, but I haven’t read 1984 and Animal Farm since I was 17—the summer before college—and I haven’t read the rest of his fiction at all. But I love the nonfiction. I taught “Shooting and Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language” to countless freshman and not

only memorized important passages, but stored away their main ideas, about anti-colonialism and about deliberate obfuscation, among those very most important ideas to me. I recently read Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia and was convinced that Orwell matters significantly. So this book was a natural for me.Hitchens’ writing and his arguments are sophisticated. I read this one like a text at school, looking up relevant stuff, marking passages, writing in the margins. It’s a little book. Hitchen’s goal was not a complete analysis of Orwell so much a plea to take this guy seriously, don’t let this 20th century writer fade away as relevant only to his own time (1903-1950—Orwell died of TB and he might have been saved had he been able to get the appropriate antibiotic from the US in the immediate post-war period).Hitchens seems to think Orwell’s anti-colonial stance his most significant since that’s the first concept he tackles. So do I. I’m positive that “Shooting an Elephant”, which I read first in a Freshman English class myself, colored my view of colonialism, arguments about postcolonial literature, and about the third world generally. Before reading this book I’d have said my own anti-colonial bent was learned as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa; now I’d say the fire was probably lit by Orwell and that was a huge part of my motivation to join the Peace Corps in the first place. Hitchens goes on to analyze how both the left and the right have used and abused Orwell as well as his ideas about America, “Englishness”, feminism, and anti-Communism. He typically deals not only with Orwell’s relationship with the ideas but how proponents of those ideas deal with Orwell. Finally he analyzes the fiction, convincing me to reread 1984 if not to read all the fiction. He even touches on Orwell and post-modernism in a chapter that not only rescues Orwell from the post-modernists, but causes me embarrassment at my initial enthusiasm for post-modernist analysis of literature and validates my current views that it’s just as well the academic world is getting over that craze.

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LibraryThing member john257hopper

An interesting exploration of Orwell's literary and political persona and how he has been both claimed and vilified by both the political left and political right. His staunch opposition to both Stalin and Hitler were heroic especially in retrospect and earned him a lot of opprobrium both from

those intellectuals who should have known better but made excuses for Stalin, and from British and American officialdom during the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Worth reading in light of the modern tendency of some contemporaries to brush over the horrors of certain dictatorships in Africa and Asia and come to support, or at least make excuses for them, simply because they are anti-Western, on the "principle" that "they're against America/the capitalist West, so they must be alright".

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LibraryThing member soylentgreen23

I like Christopher Hitchens, because he seems so fair and balanced. The other book I've read of his, 'God is Not Great', is the perfect antidote to Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' - it covers the same ground, makes many of the same points, but in such an even-handed way that it is impossible to

criticise his style: it's the substance that matters.

This, an earlier book, concentrates on George Orwell, hailed by some as a kind of saint, and pilloried by others. Hitchens takes the middle road, addressing those who put too much stock in the great writer as well as those that have attacked him or misused his name; in the end, one realises that Orwell is a man like any other, with both strengths and weaknesses that must be fairly considered.

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LibraryThing member br77rino

A good overview of Orwell by one of his biggest fans, Christopher Hitchens.

LibraryThing member bibliothecarivs

The late Hitchens is your personal guide to Orwell's life and career in ten chapters of lively analysis. I don't think a familiarity with his work is a prerequisite, but having read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time in the last couple months surely enriched my experience here.

LibraryThing member reganrule

Skip it. Why was this book "widely acclaimed?" It lacks a thesis, it's hack scholarship, and it's unnecessarily pusillanimous. Orwell matters, Hitchens' opinion of why he matters does not.

LibraryThing member adam.currey

I'm a fan of Hitchens, but this one was just too dry for me - I couldn't finish it.

LibraryThing member nmele

Ironically, this is the first book of Hitchens that I have read, but it is also fitting since, like Orwell, he seems to fit none of our tightly defined political orthodoxies. This book is an honest, critical appraisal of George Orwell that examines many of the anti-Orwell critiques. Hitchens

concludes: "Orwell's 'views' have been largely vindicated by Time....But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them."

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LibraryThing member jwhenderson

The iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens provides a portrait of George Orwell that is neither hagiographic nor overly critical. Organized topically there are short essays covering such areas as the left, the right, Empire, America, feminists, and a brief review of the novels. This short study is both

useful as an introduction to Orwell, the man, and a review of his life and ideas for those who, like myself, admire the man.

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LibraryThing member foof2you

I found this book difficult to read, I like Hitchens style and his other writing, this just seemed dry. I read book for enjoyment or when in school because I had to read certain books. Hitchens does look at Orwell from many different points of view.

LibraryThing member markm2315

CH's erudition on Orwell is very impressive and the smoothness of his acerbity is frequently entertaining. He does answer the question, "Why does Orwell matter?" on the book's last page:
that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while

principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

Or, in my own abbreviated summary, Orwell lived an exposed mostly Leftist intellectual life, with occasional vacillations and, in retrospect, some misogyny and homophobia, but he tried to have an honest and rational approach to his convictions.

Hitchens spends some time running down Orwell's fiction, and ultimately I don't think the title's implied question is really answered since I think most of Orwell's readers would respond simply that the reason that he matters is that he wrote well about things that mattter, then and now.

Lastly, in terms of lines of print, this book is mostly Hitchens criticizing the critics of Orwell. This can dry things out rather extensively, and consequently, I did not feel that I was brought closer to Orwell in the same way that I did, for example, in the author's book on Thomas Paine.

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