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World Hotels - Burmese Days: A Novel
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
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Manufacturer: Mariner Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780156148504
ISBN: 0156148501
Label: Mariner Books
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 1974-03-20
Publisher: Mariner Books
Studio: Mariner Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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Orwell draws on his years of experience in India to tell this story of the waning days of British imperialism. A handful of Englishmen living in a settlement in Burma congregate in the European Club, drink whiskey, and argue over an impending order to admit a token Asian.
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Summary: Burmese Days
Comment: George Orwell's early novel "Burmese Days" (1934) is both a story of failed love and a critical portrayal of British imperial rule in Burma. The novel is set in 1926 in a district of Imperial Burma that Orwell calls Kyauktada. Many readers see the novel as in part autobiographical. In the 1920s, Orwell(1903 -- 1950) spent five years in Burma as a policeman. The main character of the book, Flory, is sometimes taken as Orwell's projection of what his life in Burma would have become if he had remained. But some readers also see as the Orwellian character a policeman named Maxwell who unnecessarily kills a Burmese and suffers a dreadful vengeance in his turn.
Orwell writes in a highly charged, descriptive way of the Burmese jungles, the sweltering heat, and the interactions between the Burmese and the British. Although it is short and easy to read, the novel develops several themes. The primary character in the story is 35 year old John Flory, who has spent 15 years in Burma as a timber merchant. He suffers from a disfiguring birthmark on his right cheek. Unlike the small group of his fellow Englishmen in Kyauktada, Flory has developed some sympathy over the years with the Burmese people. In particular, he has befriended a Dr. Veraswami, an Indian physician who admires the British unduly and who aspires to their society. Lonely, alcoholic, and frustrated in his 15 years in Burma, Flory has had several Burmese mistresses, and consorts with prostitutes. He becomes smitten with an 18 year old woman, Elizabeth Lackerstein, who comes to live with her uncle and aunt following the death of her mother in Paris.In pursuing Elizabeth, Flory dismisses his current mistress, a Burmese woman named Ma Hla May, who returns the favor by blackmailing him. Flory hopes that Elizabeth can cure his loneliness even if, as he says to her, he never even touches her hand. Yet the two are poorly matched as Elizabeth has little but contempt for the Burmese or for the life of the mind. A great deal of "Burmese Days" explores the troubled courtship between Flory and Elizabeth.
The book is probably better-known for its unflattering attitude towards British imperialism than for its story of a failed relationship. Orwell shows a small group of English businessmen unmercifully exploiting and patronizing the Burmese. At the direction of higher British authorities, the English in Kyauktada are urged to admit a local to their exclusive club. The members are highly racist and only Flory is willing to take even a faltering step in proposing Dr. Veraswami for membership. The small club membership is shown in varying degrees of bigotry, debauchery, drunkenness and exploitation.
The most clearly drawn Burmese character is the Magistrate, U Po Kin, so obese he can hardly stand and the embodiment of evil. U Po Kin plots to destroy Dr. Veraswami and eventually Flory as well.
Although "Burmese Days" includes many scenes of corruption, theft, and prostitution, it is dominated by scenes of violence and death. In an important passage, Orwell describes a hunting trip of Flory and Elizabeth during their courtship. Orwell portrays the cruelty of this endeavor, in a long troubling portrayal of the shooting and killing of a leopard. Death and violence are brought home further when one of the Englishmen, Maxwell, wantonly kills a Burmese in the course of a "riot" fomented by U Po Kin. Maxwell is dismembered by the Burmese in a shocking way. In another instance, the most bigoted of the Englishmen, Ellis, strikes a young Burmese boy with his cane, blinding him. This cruel action provokes a response from the natives as they attempt to storm the clubhouse. And the book comes to a violent ending.
Self-centeredness, lack of self-knowledge, and the ubiquitous presence of sanctimony and cant underlie both themes of the work -- the portrait of alienation, loneliness and purposelessness as applied to the life of Flory and the lives of the other characters -- and the critique of imperialism,subjection and cultural chauvinism as it applies to the relationship between the British and the Burmese. Orwell is unsparing in his criticism of British colonialism but he avoids the tendency to idealize the exploited peoples. He shows an understanding and some level of sympathy for all his characters, with the possible exception of U Po Khin. "Burmese Days" is a highly readable, thoughtful novel.
Robin Friedman
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Summary: Pox Britannica
Comment: With his very first novel, Orwell earned an honorable position on the crowded shelves of Raj Lit. It was a kind of self-liberation, so he could drop the subject henceforth.
He had spent 5 years in Burma as a police officer. Why had he done that? His family was of the shabby genteel class, and his father's pension from the imperial service in India was barely enough to carry him through school. So he skipped university and did what the people in his novel do: sign up for the colonies in the hope of reasonable wealth and career.
When he quit after 5 years, he had some explaining to do. He did it with this novel.
Most first novels are autobiographic to some extent, but Orwell did something different: he figured out what he himself would have become had he stayed. His 'hero' Flory is an alter ego under the hypothical assumption of having stayed for 15 years instead of quitting after 5.
Flory has a different job, but that doesn't matter much. He is a deeply lonely and frustrated man without prospects. He is disgusted with himself and with his social crowd, the sahiblog, who enforce conformism in the most primitive way. They are generally a disgusting group of people.
Flory meets a young woman who seems the answer to his loneliness problem. For her, he might be the solution to her problem, which is the expectation of spinsterhood in poverty. They misunderstand each other thouroughly and make a huge mess of it.
The personal tragedy of Flory is framed by stories of imperial intrigues, by local officials playing Machiavelli and by the sahibs sinking into delirium tremens.
I read it first when I was working and living in other parts of the by then former Raj. I think everything would have been different if the poorpeople, the sahiblog, had had airconditioning. They might have been able to use their brains more.
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Summary: The Best Was Yet To Come (3.5/5)
Comment: BURMESE DAYS is my least-favorite Orwell novel - not because it is badly written (in some ways it features his very best descriptive prose outside of 1984) - but because it is the only book he ever wrote which lacked an overt political purpose. By his own admission, Orwell was at his best when he was writing politically, and at his worst when he was "betrayed into purple passages" by his love of language for language's sake. And while BURMESE DAYS is most definitely an anti-imperialist work from start to finish, it was penned mainly so that Orwell could exorcise the demon of his own years in the Southeast Asia from his head. As he later wrote, "The scenery of Burma so haunted me I later had to write a novel just to get rid of it."
BURMESE DAYS is the story of a young British official named Flory working in the jungles of Burma during the middle 1920s. What Flory actually does for the Empire isn't relevant to the story; suffice to say that he's simply one of the many lower middle-class Englanders who were able, by virtue of being white and in the East, of living in a style they never could have afforded in England - horses, mistresses, servants, whisky, club life. Despite the petty priveleges he cannot bring himself to relinquish, however, he hates the Empire and the psychological burdens it imposes on those who serve it - especially the necessity of isolating oneself from the naitives (whom Flory likes much better than the drunken, racist, morally decayed British officials he is forced to associate with). The plot of the novel revolves around two separate, yet linked storylines: the first is Flory's politically inconvenient friendship with a Burmese doctor, whose nomination to the hitherto whites-only club is the cause of much ugliness, gossip and plotting; the second is his clumsy pursuit of a husband-hunting Englishwoman whom he sees as a refuge from his terrible isolation. Both situations put Flory through an emotional wringer, as he awkwardly tries to protect his friend and at the same make a vital emotional connection with a woman who is much, much less than she appears.
Please don't mistake me: I love Orwell and here is much to recommend the book. The atmosphere of Imperial Burma in the 20s - the heat, the humidity, the sleepless nights, the hunting parties, the boring, endlessly recycled conversations, the [...] everybody keeps and nobody talks about, the gin-drinking, the hypocrisy and loneliness - is expertly captured by Orwell's pen. The descriptions of Burma are unbelievably vivid, and Flory himself is a refreshingly weak and complicated protagonist - strong enough to have subversive opinions but not quite strong enough to stand up for them. And yet BURMESE DAYS is one of those books that is a bit less than the sum of its parts - most of the individual scenes work, and Orwell's descriptive prose is often startlingly beautiful - but taken as a whole the book doesn't precisely know what it is trying to accomplish. Is it just a novel, with anti-imperialism as recurring subtext, or is it an anti-imperialist screed in novel form? The fact that this question can be asked at all shows how much Orwell grew as a thinker in the years after it was published.
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Summary: everything a novel should be
Comment: This is by far the best book I have read in a long, long time. Orwell's mastery of the English language is apparent and the words flow so elegantly from cover to cover, it will be over before you know it. The story is powerful and interesting.
If you liked 1984 or Animal Farm, you need to read this too. While less famous than his later works, this novel is excellent in every sense of the word.
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