Rating: 
Summary: Depressing.
Review: Most people will read this book and think happily upon Gordon's final transformation into a rational human being. "Satire!", they'll scream. "Hatred of the money god is silly, good paying jobs aren't, moaning about money is dumb when you can have it at your disposal!" Myself, I found Gordon's reconciliation with the money god to be just as depressing as Winston Smith's reconciliation with Big Brother. This book, as god-awful depressing as it may be, is one of George's finest works. People who mistake it for satire have been sublimely duped by the sappy ending. Gordon, like Winston, loses himself and doesn't even realize it. Writers take note: This book is for you.
Rating:
Summary: One of Orwell's Best
Review: My God! Whatever happenned to good old clean writing where one regards the scene, action, events and characters at hand, contemplating universals and dissonent examples to reach some higher, usually very personal, truth? Thank God there is still Orwell? This is one of his best. Forget the literary critic's remarks about this being a young Orwell. Who cares? It is honest, clean and offers a valuable example of life of working poor in England in the 1930s. When you contrast it to our present circumstance you see a lot that has changed and so much that has not; two pound / month was just not enough to survive, but to slowly starve to death. But Gordon will not yeild to the Money God that he has delcared war against. While he is waging this war we glimpse at his self-induced problems along the way. The ending poses that critical question; Is he a hero? Was he conqueror of, or conquered by the Money God? There are a few dated expressions which add colour to the book in my estimation. The trash readers of the times he refers to are unknown to most of us nowadays. But it does not matter. We know what he means. You could just as easily substitute Danielle Steel with the names of the other trash authors of the 1930s. We would then get his intent. A great read. A true modern classic.
Rating: 
Summary: Ironizes post-war British middle-class
Review: Of all his novels, this was Orwell's least favorite. It tells the story of one man's war against money and the middle-class values and ideals of 1930s London. The "money=bad" message is about as subtle as a brick over the head, and you probably will get tired of the somewhat preachy rantings of the book's anti-hero, Gordon Comstock. Yet the deptiction of post-WWI London is quite good and can provide some important insight into Orwell's better novels. As for the "upbeat" ending, it is nothing of the sort. Orwell does not sell out Gordon by leaving him set up in a "good" job, living happily in wedded bliss with his beloved Rosemary. Rather, he turns a conventional denouement (marriage and birth) on its ear. The irony that runs throughout the novel (and which is particularly acute in its ending) makes "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" worth a read, even for those who are not Orwell fans.
Rating:
Summary: Ironizes post-war British middle-class
Review: Of all his novels, this was Orwell's least favorite. It tells the story of one man's war against money and the middle-class values and ideals of 1930s London. The "money=bad" message is about as subtle as a brick over the head, and you probably will get tired of the somewhat preachy rantings of the book's anti-hero, Gordon Comstock. Yet the deptiction of post-WWI London is quite good and can provide some important insight into Orwell's better novels.
As for the "upbeat" ending, it is nothing of the sort. Orwell does not sell out Gordon by leaving him set up in a "good" job, living happily in wedded bliss with his beloved Rosemary. Rather, he turns a conventional denouement (marriage and birth) on its ear. The irony that runs throughout the novel (and which is particularly acute in its ending) makes "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" worth a read, even for those who are not Orwell fans.
Rating:
Summary: An Early Orwell TRIUMPH
Review: One of the most underrated, least-known masterpieces I have ever read. I could not put it down! The Orwell brilliance that finally became better known in Animal Farm and 1984 shines forth peek-a-boo style in this book, easily the best of his earlier works. The most human book he ever wrote. Quite charming, quite ridiculously idealistic, in it's positive ending it is unlike the darkness he would write about later--though shades of it are there throughout. Oh but I love this book. One of my all-time favorites. Orwell was the best author of the 20th century, in my book.
Rating: 
Summary: An early Orwell failure
Review: Orwell repudiated his early novels, and it's easy to see why when you read "Aspidistra." In this novel, Orwell steered mostly clear of the Joyce-inspired purple prose that marred "A Clergyman's Daughter," but that's not enough to save it. The protagonist, would-be poet Gordon Comstock, toils in self-imposed exile and poverty in secondhand bookshops, constantly bemoaning his lack of pecuniary means, although there's a "good job" at the New Albion ad agency waiting for him to reclaim it. He's a thoroughly unsympathetic character, peevish and boorish, who treats his saintly girlfriend abominably, and the ambiguous ending, with Comstock getting engaged and rejoining the ad agency, caps it all off: is Orwell saying that Comstock has been defeated (returning shamefacedly to the realm of the "money-god"), or has Comstock finally come to his senses? We're never sure where Orwell's coming from here, and for a writer whose goal was to make us see the economic underpinnings of human behavior, this ambiguity is most un-Orwellian.
Rating:
Summary: An early Orwell failure
Review: Orwell repudiated his early novels, and it's easy to see why when you read "Aspidistra." In this novel, Orwell steered mostly clear of the Joyce-inspired purple prose that marred "A Clergyman's Daughter," but that's not enough to save it. The protagonist, would-be poet Gordon Comstock, toils in self-imposed exile and poverty in secondhand bookshops, constantly bemoaning his lack of pecuniary means, although there's a "good job" at the New Albion ad agency waiting for him to reclaim it. He's a thoroughly unsympathetic character, peevish and boorish, who treats his saintly girlfriend abominably, and the ambiguous ending, with Comstock getting engaged and rejoining the ad agency, caps it all off: is Orwell saying that Comstock has been defeated (returning shamefacedly to the realm of the "money-god"), or has Comstock finally come to his senses? We're never sure where Orwell's coming from here, and for a writer whose goal was to make us see the economic underpinnings of human behavior, this ambiguity is most un-Orwellian.
Rating:
Summary: Orwell in one of his best moments
Review: Orwell writes this tale about the lonesome "Gordon Comstock", a book-seller who has declared a war against the "money world". He goes home at night and tries to write poetry, but is usually unsuccessful. His sweetheart, Rosemary, tries her hardest to understand him, but fails. Yet, she is patient. Gordon lives his life on "two quid" a week, fighting his arch-enemy, the immortal aspidistra plant. And despite the book's depressingness, hope breaks through in the end
Rating:
Summary: An Orwellian tale of the British middle class.
Review: The aspidistra plant is symbolic of the statis quo to our belligerent anti-hero Gordon Comstock; of common British middle-middle class stock; a family that "nothing everhappened to." His battle against the aspidistra and money and making good is existential but he doesn't know this having never read THE STRANGER because it hasn't beenwritten yet. This narrative of all the things wrong with a consumer/free market/capitalist society between world wars could easily be written now by some starving young writer in any large city here in the United States of America. Here is a man who realizes early on that "Faith, hope, money --only a saint could have the first two without having the third." Yet I found myself rooting him on, wanting him to win his battle which is really impossible to do because even if you are on the fringes of a society you are still inescapably part of it. In this way THE STRANGER is the book with the happy ending despite the declarations on the jacket of KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING of an "upbeat ending".
Rating:
Summary: An Orwellian tale of the British middle class.
Review: The aspidistra plant is symbolic of the statis quo to our belligerent anti-hero Gordon Comstock; of common British middle-middle class stock; a family that "nothing ever
happened to." His battle against the aspidistra and money and making good is existential but he doesn't know this having never read THE STRANGER because it hasn't been
written yet. This narrative of all the things wrong with a consumer/free market/capitalist society between world wars could easily be written now by some starving young writer in any large city here in the United States of America. Here is a man who realizes early on that "Faith, hope, money --only a saint could have the first two without having
the third." Yet I found myself rooting him on, wanting him to win his battle which is really impossible to do because even if you are on the fringes of a society you are still
inescapably part of it. In this way THE STRANGER is the book with the happy ending despite the declarations on the jacket of KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING of an "upbeat ending".
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