Orwell's Roses
by
43/99
Critics' Rating Index
76/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
99/99
Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
A lush exploration of roses, pleasure, and politics, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world "In the year 1936 a writer planted roses." So begins Rebecca Solnit's new book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this understudied aspect of Orwell's life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit's celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti's roses and her Stalinism, Stalin's obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell's slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid's critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
Reviews
"[A] lyrical exploration."
"Solnit's own prose style...conforms to none of the rules outlined by Orwell in 'Politics and the English Language': to avoid 'lack of precision,' 'foreign phrases,' and 'a long word where a short one will do' ..."
"Solnit doesn't toot her own horn."
"Though Orwell's every word had been scrutinized by the time Solnit began this project, her stellar book shows us that an original thinker can make any subject fresh."
"That novel, Solnit convincingly shows, is not primarily about how totalitarianism works but rather about what it destroys: consciousness, experience, life lived with the full human instrument — the very vision of political freedom that she has earlier identified at the heart of Orwell's values ..."
"Orwell will always be relied on for his astute understanding of the threat of totalitarianism and its malignant lies; Solnit also ensures that we'll value Orwell's profound understanding of how love, pleasure, and awe for nature can be powerful forms of resistance."
"Solnit is particularly good on the attempts made by various dictators and their stooges to subordinate nature to their own ideological ends, or to their own personal vanity ..."
"A fine Orwell biography with equally fine diversions into his favorite leisure activity."
"The green-fingered and the politically committed alike will want to curl up with this book as the gardening year draws to a close and we reflect on a time during which nature has been more of a solace than usual."
"'Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to him, and pleasures,' she writes about Orwell."
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