1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) & Animal Farm

Inbunden bok. Modernista. 2024. 414 sidor.

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1984. With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell's 1984 takes on ever new life in new editions.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength".

In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania, where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organisation called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party.

Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be ...

Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell's novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.

"1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present." (Lionel Trilling).

"Orwell saw that the act of falsifying reality is secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power." (The New Yorker).

ANIMAL FARM. A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War. It is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer's Nineteen eighty-four. A brilliant political satire and allegorical fable about the corrupting effects of power. Published in 1945 it remains, to this day, one of the most famous and influential works of fiction ever written.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master, Mr Jones, and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control.

Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

Orwell's chilling 'fairy story' is a timeless and devastating satire of idealism betrayed by power and corruption. Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Orwell's immortal satire remains an unparalleled masterpiece and more relevant than ever.

GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. He is one of the very few writers to be compared in power, artistry and moral authority with Jonathan Swift. The purity of Orwell's spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy emphasize the stark message of man's inhumanity to man and beast's to beast.

(Engelsk text).