Homage to Catalonia

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Summary: Riveting
Review: In pithy prose Orwell seamlessly describes frontline warfare in oftentimes humorous detail. This is an excellant read.

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Summary: A Great Book
Review: I could not put down Orwell's gripping story of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the politics behind the Republican side. His tale is fascinating, and even the political discussions read as smoothly as his novels.

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Summary: Orwell tells of situation that gave him his basic focus.
Review: In 1936 Orwell fell in love with worker-Anarchist controlled Catalonia. Of course, he was on the Loyalist side. But he did not realize, at first, the nature and extent of the conflict within the Loyalist side. The reactionary press was saying the Loyalist's side was Communist. But the truth is that the Communists originally had very little influence at the beginning. The Communists were able to gain power because the Soviet Union was the only country supplying the Loyalists with arms. In addition to his experience as a memeber of the P.O.U.M (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) militia and his nearly fatal shot wound through his neck, Orwell recounts the small civil war--within the civil war--following the Communist action to take over the Anarchist-run telephone exchange in Barcelonia in May 1937. He and his wife escaped into France when the Communist-controlled police of Barcelonia outlawed the P.O.U.M. But, most important, are chapters five and eleven, where Orwell sorts out the politics on the Loyalist side.

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Summary: Well, this book is not a masterpiece, but worth of reading.
Review: You can see what was going on in Spain in 1937. But, this is not fair because Orwell did not like communists especially who were related to the USSR. You'll get to know this point if you read 'Animal farm'.

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Summary: The definitive account of the Spanish Civil War
Review: This amazing book demonstrates Orwell's remarkeable gift to understand the momentous events occuring in Spain as they were rapidly occuring around him. Orwell makes you fell the dynamic between the misery of war and the triumphant feelings of fighting for what is right. This book is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in the Spanish Civil War!

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Summary: a must read for any student of politics or military history
Review: this book is a personnal favorite of mine. It manages to attain the balance of politics and frontline action in a very smoooth fashion. This book also gives an idea to the political arena just before the second world war. if you enjoy political writing stripped of BS. He states his opinions on the situation on the frontline and political turmoil within the Republican party. My review doesnt do the book justice buy it or check it out from the library youll be thankful you did.

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Summary: a marvelous book of war and politics
Review: This is a masterful book about Orwell's service with the anarchists and socialists who attempted (and failed) to defend their egalitarian society from a Fascist rebellion. A third of the book conveys the feel of the trenches: rats, stench, comradery, and shoddy weapons. Much of the book delves into the politics of the time, and though it can be tedious, Orwell tells us about the ideological differences on the Left which helped to defeat their cause. This experience helps to understand his _1984_ and _Animal Farm_, as he witnessed good people abused at the hands of power and politics. Some readers will tire of the politics, but most will find that Orwell's treatment of this fascinating, complex war is exceptionally clear and engaging. The war, and Orwell's book, provide clues to the rest of the century.

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Summary: Extraordinary account of the Spanish Civil War
Review: I was put off Orwell at an early age by reading 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which I found terribly depressing. Thirty years later, I finally got around to reading 'Homage to Catalonia' and I wish I hadn't waited so long because it is absolutely fascinating. Orwell's account of fighting on the front line during the war is really reamrkable. It is astonishing to earn what an absolute shambles the war was, with soldiers armed with hopleessly antiquated weapons. The Republican and Nationalist front lines were so far apart that most of the time they can't even fire at each other, being too far apart to score a hit, so they are reduced to shouting propoganda at each other through megaphones. I had no idea Orwell could be funny, at times reading this book is like reading a scenario for a farcical comedy. You get a good sense of the privations and squalor of life in the front line, also, surprisingly, the cold (it had honestly never occured to me that Spain was ever cold). There is an incredibly vivivd description of how Orwell felt when he got shot in action. Away from the front, Orwell is shocked to discover that the Republicans seem to be more interested in fighting each other than the Nationalists. The Communists begin to act vindictively towards the Trotskyists and members of POUM, the organisation under whose banner Orwell had fought. He describes his horror as he sees men who had given up everything to go and fight for the Republic, treated as criminals by the Republican army. There is a very funny scene where he describes how his hotel room is searched by police looking for evidence of subversive activity. they search the room for about an hour, looking everywhere, but they never touch the bed, because his wife is lying in it, even though,as Orwell reflects, there could be a ton of Trotskyist literature under the pillow, and machine guns under the mattress. Hilarious in parts, heartbreaking in others, this is an unforgettable book.

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Summary: A well told true story
Review: Unlike 1984 or Animal Farm there is a constant upbeat current in this revealing account of his participation in the Spanish Civil War. Although a very political affair, Orwell's participation is not tied to the tenets of one particular party as much as his desire to do good in the world by helping to stop Fascism. So he brings his wife to Spain, enlists in the militia, is sent to the front, wounded, chased by the police, engaged in street fighting gun battles between different political parties that are on the same side of the war. An amazing account so very well told. There is a chapter in the middle that has to do with the complexities of the political parties at the time, at the very end of the previous chapter Orwell writes that if you are not interested in the politics to skip the chapter, so I skipped the chapter, preferring to stay with the adventure story. It is an adventure story, a war story, a comedy, a sad tragedy, but heartfelt and so real. Great book if you like good writing, or war stories, or politics or Spain. Above all, a well told story made more interesting that when Orwell finishes he is still assuming Franco would be defeated, which was not the case at all.

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Summary: A partly personal perspective of a highly misunderstood war
Review: Attracted by the idea of fighting against Fascism, the English journalist, Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, went to Spain in late 1936 to cover the fight against Fascism and found himself in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in north-east Spain, joining the militia of the anti-Fascist "Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista", the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification - or POUM, for short. Yet Orwell himself, in a literary work praised by many for its - or its author's - honesty, admits to have joined without any pretence of knowing or caring what it meant to be part of any particular anti-Fascist militia. His take on all the squabbling, which existed at the time between the various anti-Fascist factions, was much the same as anybody who was ignorant of the facts; that is, "Can't we put this political stuff aside and get on with the war?" As a result, the consequences of being in the POUM militia - if not a party member himself (which he was not) - would become all too obvious later on when it was almost too late for him personally.

The book is a mixture of a personal, eyewitness account of the fighting on the Aragon Front, in which he participated actively, and of the background to what he called the "internecine" nature of the infighting between the anti-Fascist factions which was to lead to back-stabbing by rival factions, including the Communists, with the POUM as the main target for attacks in the press, both Spanish and foreign.

Orwell describes life in the front line in language that is meant to convey in an honest - some might say too honest - way just how things were: the ways in which pathetically ill-trained and ill-equipped militiamen were thrown into the front line without even having been shown any weapons of any kind, the privations of life in the trenches, the sheer boredom of being on guard-duty with only the occasional firing from enemy positions, several hundreds of meters away, to break the monotony, the sight of destroyed buildings, the fertile lands being turned into a wasteland, and fear of the cold being greater than fear of the enemy.

For him, the most memorable incidents were the night attack against the Fascist lines, in which he participated, and the moment when he was shot in the throat, albeit at a later date. His descriptions of both incidents are lively and vivid. The crawling through no-man's-land, trying to make as little noise as possible, the firing of shots in unison, the throwing of hand-grenades, the deafening noises, the shouting of attackers and defenders, the bullets zipping overhead too near for comfort, and even Orwell himself chasing a Fascist up a trench trying (and failing) to bayonet him - all are described in language that he keeps as objective as possible, even to the point of regretting trying to kill anyone, even those trying to kill him.

This is due to the fact that people like him were caught up in a war whose political ramifications were either misunderstood or else not understood at all, thanks largely to their being kept deliberately ignorant of the propagandist mud-slinging and governmental back-stabbing behind their backs. The militiamen (Orwell hardly ever uses the word, "soldiers") only knew that they were fighting, whether by choice (as in Orwell's case) or not, for causes which turned out to be somewhat dubious once one had a grasp of what the war was really supposed to be about.

Orwell devotes a considerable amount of space to trying to explain the political background to all the war, yet he sends a caveat to the reader: "Beware of my partisanship", indicating that his account is necessarily one-sided, if only because he had been fighting allegedly against Fascism. At times, it can seem utterly confusing to a reader who, like him, knows nothing of the politics prevailing in 1930s' Spain. It seems that, if Franco was not trying to overthrow the Republican government, the various left-wing parties, representing socialism, anarchism and communism, were vying for power in the most brutal manner.

The one thing that was most misunderstood by the foreign press, Orwell notes, was that there was a revolution going on in Spain, yet the Communists allegedly did NOT want revolution to happen, if only because revolution could only come once the war had been won. Instead, the POUM ended up as the political scapegoat, as it was viciously attacked in the press as a subversive organization that was allegedly pro-Fascist, even though the opposite was true. The party was suppressed, and it was a cat-and-mouse game for the wounded Orwell to avoid arrest and detention without trial by the police. His disgust at the way his fellow militiamen were treated is clear - these people had risked their lives at the front yet, once back in Barcelona, they were being thrown into prison.

Orwell neatly puts propaganda and the war into perspective. What Spaniards and foreigners alike wanted to believe depended upon their prejudices being reinforced by whatever was being told in the press, and Orwell quotes many sources which were written in a way designed deliberately to mislead and mis-inform. Even British pro-Communist papers swallowed what Orwell points to as "lies" spread by the Spanish government in order to ensure that the main reasons for the war in Spain were never fully explained.

It could not have been easy for Orwell, reading about how he and others like him were being portrayed as "Trotskyists in Fascist pay" when they were, in fact, in the bitterest fighting against the Fascists, yet such was the nature of the contemporary reporting of one of the least understood wars of the 20th century, not least because the politics behind it was badly understood. The attitudes that prevailed in Spain simply did not exist in England, something that Orwell points out, and this state of affairs simply contributed to the indifference to, and lack of understanding of, the war by people in his native England, to which he returned soon after his escape from Spain in June 1937.

Said to be one of the most vivid examples in 20th century English literature of the futility of war and its consequences, "Homage to Catalonia" may be regarded as a combination of a personal memoir and an anti-war polemic, yet it has only been really understood and appreciated properly in the light of events which occurred since the book was first published in 1938. It is, indeed, still a powerful work where Orwell shows that he has the ability to be objective about what was happening, neither attacking nor defending the events around him, the hallmark of a true journalist.