Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book, well written and interesting
Review: George Comstock, living in 1930s London, wants to gain the benefits of a good life without working hard for them. So, with his own peculiar philosophies and ideas in his head, he rebels from the conditions of life he finds himself in, tries to pursue an easier life, becomes lazy whilst perceiving himself clever doing so, finds himself falling, broke each week, having to count his pennies, his life deteriorating; and eventually comes round - full circle - to accept the limitations that modern life generally forces onto most of us, whether we like the nature of the concrete jungles we live in or not...This is an excellent book about life and the forces in life we are subject to - the fact that most of us have to be compliant cogs in a huge wheel of industry of some sort if we want to get on in life, whether we want to be or not, and if we try to step off the treadmill and leave the rat-race, it doesn't work well and we won't like where it puts us. The book is a very good read, and well worth reading. It should be handed to any child who wants to be a rebel and thinks he can get by without working hard, to make him understand better some of the things that modern life involves and requires of us.
Rating: 
Summary: conforming a non-comformist
Review: Having completed "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", I have now read all of the novels of George Orwell. I can say with such authority that this one may be his best. George Orwell was, first and foremost, a Socialist and this book is his examination of being a Socialist in a Capitalist world. His hero, Gordon Comstock, is mired in a dead-end job that is just middle-class enough to require proper dress and behavior but not enough to enable him to afford any but the most essential living expenses. We sympathize with him. Or at least we do until we realize that his disdain for the pursuit of money has pointed him in the opposite direction. He is so anti-capitalist that he purposely keeps himself in his lower state. He quit a previous job because it paid too much. He won't strive beyond his current status because then he would enter a higher social status. He is convinced of the righteousness of his beliefs even though he has bled his sister dry "borrowing" money from her over the years. She "lends" him the money because the family always had such high hopes for this erudite young man. Gordon complains, to those that listen, that money is the root of all evil yet he is so ready to be victimized by it. He complains to his girl-friend that she measures him by his net-worth. This isn't true but he can't see that the problem is that HE is measuring himself by his own net-worth. He talks the talk but can't walk the walk. Well, money leads to one disaster of his own making and ends up as the solution to another "disaster" of his own making. I'm sure the prospective reader would prefer to read the book to see how his story ends so I won't go into any more details here. This novel is enjoyable on many levels. I found myself, like most, getting upset with Gordon Comstock for his self-destructive "nobility". I was ready to rant and rave about it until I remembered my post-college Bohemian days and realized that I went through such a stage myself. I'm sure many of us have and so I think there is a personal connection that will appeal to a lot of readers. For pure literary merit, this is a hard 20th Century satire to top. Orwell scared a lot of people with his futuristic novels "Animal Farm" and "1984". He tried to indoctrinate many a reader with his Socialistic essays including his half-novel/half-essay; "The Road to Wigan Pier". I have a feeling that he was poking fun at himself in "Keep the Aspidistras Flying". Maybe that's why it works so well.
Rating:
Summary: conforming a non-comformist
Review: Having completed "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", I have now read all of the novels of George Orwell. I can say with such authority that this one may be his best. George Orwell was, first and foremost, a Socialist and this book is his examination of being a Socialist in a Capitalist world. His hero, Gordon Comstock, is mired in a dead-end job that is just middle-class enough to require proper dress and behavior but not enough to enable him to afford any but the most essential living expenses. We sympathize with him. Or at least we do until we realize that his disdain for the pursuit of money has pointed him in the opposite direction. He is so anti-capitalist that he purposely keeps himself in his lower state. He quit a previous job because it paid too much. He won't strive beyond his current status because then he would enter a higher social status. He is convinced of the righteousness of his beliefs even though he has bled his sister dry "borrowing" money from her over the years. She "lends" him the money because the family always had such high hopes for this erudite young man. Gordon complains, to those that listen, that money is the root of all evil yet he is so ready to be victimized by it. He complains to his girl-friend that she measures him by his net-worth. This isn't true but he can't see that the problem is that HE is measuring himself by his own net-worth. He talks the talk but can't walk the walk. Well, money leads to one disaster of his own making and ends up as the solution to another "disaster" of his own making. I'm sure the prospective reader would prefer to read the book to see how his story ends so I won't go into any more details here. This novel is enjoyable on many levels. I found myself, like most, getting upset with Gordon Comstock for his self-destructive "nobility". I was ready to rant and rave about it until I remembered my post-college Bohemian days and realized that I went through such a stage myself. I'm sure many of us have and so I think there is a personal connection that will appeal to a lot of readers. For pure literary merit, this is a hard 20th Century satire to top. Orwell scared a lot of people with his futuristic novels "Animal Farm" and "1984". He tried to indoctrinate many a reader with his Socialistic essays including his half-novel/half-essay; "The Road to Wigan Pier". I have a feeling that he was poking fun at himself in "Keep the Aspidistras Flying". Maybe that's why it works so well.
Rating:
Summary: The Tedium Of Poverty
Review: It being the 100th anniversary of George Orwell I decided to read one of his books that I hadn't gotten around to yet that was recommend to me a while ago, Keep The Aspidistra Flying. It is a novel about a poet who is trying to live outside the capitalistic system with abysmal results. He vividly describes the tedium and sordidness of middle class poverty, which differs from the equally demoralizing squalid poverty of the common classes.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, if a little self-indulgent
Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a slow book, without the sort inventive thrill that I associate with Animal Farm, 1984, or even Down And Out. But in the slowness, Orwell displays a sort of human honesty, making this read more like a journal than a novel, if journals could be written from a third-person perspective. It was readable - occasionally stunningly beautiful, occasionally mind-numbingly frustrating.
The characters and the story here are sparse. The book centers on one character (Gordon), in one struggle (to be poor), sometimes inching forward, though generally losing.
I'll say right here that whatever Orwell's social and political inclinations, I did not see this as a statement on socialism, or even as a satire. What I did see was a book about the honor and futility of experimenting with poverty, about the difficulties extricating not only your actions but your judgements as well from the frame of reference you have grown up embracing,
So, as a novel about the sinking of Gordon Comstock, its not a particularly enlightening read. What turns it around is the other side of the story, the fact that Gordon Comstock, and all of us, and aspidistras, have a tendancy to rise, not to sink. The best moments in the book, and the moments that I think really give it meaning are when Gordon is thrashing around between floating and sinking, between his aspidistral clinging to dignity and his deeply held social conviction that dignity is a sham.
Orwell is, of course, a great writer, and this book is no exception. He writes clearly, and with an engagement to the reader. It was certainly well worth reading, though for me, it was a notch or two below other Orewell works I've read.
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: 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 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: If real life is a turn-off, just do this
Review: The best of George Orwell's lesser known novels is undoubtedly Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a riotous look at an intelligent and capable young man who is determined at all costs to avoid success. I wonder if any part of this tale is autobiographical, not so much in the events, which I know sometimes mirror living conditions in Orwell's own life, but in attitude. Gordon Comstock is the young man in question, somewhat educated and with modest family connections. After being the pride of his family - the smart one - he gives up his "good job" at an advertising agency to specifically seek out "not a good job", which leads him to become a bookstore clerk. Why this happens is a bit of a mystery to me, though doubtless it will be less so to other readers. In a nutshell, Gordon is at war with money. This is no deep secret that he comes to accept; it is explicitly part of his character. He doesn't care for the rat race, he doesn't like wasting his writing talents by making up stupid slogans for unnecessary or even worthless products, aimed at people too stupid to make intelligent purchasing decisions. He is good at that job, but decides he doesn't need the money. He needs the time to work on his own poetry, a long and perpetually unfinished work about London life.
The main problem he faces is that he can't afford anything on his "not a good job" salary. Not a decent place to live, not halfway-decent food or enough cigarettes to last the week, and certainly not enough to take his would-be girlfriend out for a day. Gordon's war against money is serious business.
The plotline here is simple enough. Gordon goes from day to day living his wretchedly impoverished life, wondering often how the truly lower classes manage on half his salary while supporting a wife and ten kids. He has rich friends, socialists like him. He thinks appropriately rude thoughts about the customers in the shop where he works. He goes out and tries to have good time while spending nothing, avoiding looking cheap, and disparaging his poor circumstances. This guy really reminds me of a character from a Dostoyevsky novel, perhaps Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment (though Gordon doesn't kill anyone; he does get arrested for public drunkenness, but that's as far as it goes). Smart, impoverished, at war with himself and the world. It all fits, but in a nice Orwellian way.
To end on a light note, lest there be any confusion, the aspidistra is a sturdy and rather unexceptional houseplant that thrives on low light levels. Gordon goes on and on about these plants at various times in the novel, like it's some sort of fetish. I'm not sure if things have changed much, but though Orwell makes the aspidistra out to be the national plant of England, my British co-worker had to do a google search to tell me what one looked like exactly. I guess they've gone out of favor a bit since the thirties.
This may be Orwell's finest proper novel. Personally I liked it better than Animal Farm or any of his other lesser-known novels. 1984, of course, is the best-known work, but is so outrageous in its politics that there's not so much room left for simple storytelling. Gordon Comstock is the sort of character I know so well now that I could sit down and have a beer with him and feel like we're old friends (albeit the kind that don't always get along).
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