Orwell George : Nineteen Eighty-Four (Sc)

by George Orwell

[inlibrisveritas]

I apologize ahead of time because I'm almost certain that this review is going to be tough for me to write and probably a little all over the place.
First off, this book left me absolutely speechless at the end. Every time I tried to describe it to my boyfriend the only description I could come up with is 'crazy'...which means everything from 'extreme', 'disturbing', 'shocking' and well 'crazy'.
It's not written in any sort of fancy way and it's not a masterpiece based on that. I think it's more important how it is written in such a plain way, after all it's partially a warning and needs to be understood. Once you get started you'll find that the words have the ability to sting and stick with you, even though they are plain.
I can't say I liked the characters Winston and Julia, especially not Julia, but they represented two sides of the same coin and it was important to see. One was a rebel for personal gain and the other was a rebel who thought of the future. It was also kind of shocking to see how animalistic and yet some how machine like the Outer Party truly was, and completely insane how much power the Party truly wielded over it's "followers". I think the most shocking thing to me was that everything in this book seems so...crazy, but not so crazy that it could never be accomplished. To think that this was written 1948 and yet see similarities, no matter how small, to some present day governments makes part of me kind of freeze.
A few quotes that really hit me: "We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them." There is something monstrous in changing the enemy only to destroy them, something that can hardly be described. Not only are they going to remove you from this Earth as a being, but they are going to remove 'you' as the person you were.
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." It's one of those vicious circles that requires immense amount of thought. At first you see that maybe they can never truly be conscious, and then you see that to become conscious is to rebel.
Now I'm going to go sit somewhere and take a lot of deep breaths.