My Terrible Book Review: Eric Arthur Blair

[Sediba]

The first of my Terrible Book Reviews.

What right do I have to set up as a critic of literature? Well, I don't really have any, less than most if truth will out. English was my worst class, I only just passed the final exam. I left school in my tenth year. I did well in math a and b, tech drawing and Science a. Science b a credit only. But English ... I prefer to think that my teacher took pity on me, but the truer reality is he probably wanted me out at any cost. And somewhere in my scrawl he had found the marks to push me over the line and out of his sight.

This is one of the reasons why my book reviews are so terrible, but only one

Have you noticed how people are always in a hurry these days. A worried look, a permanent frown upon their innocent pleasant faces? They are anxious, and with an anxiousness that has no identifiable root cause. You know, you see a chick you knew from ages back. She is still good looking. When the mutual hugs and kisses are over and you've had a brief catch up re Charlie and Donna and Geoffrey and what-was-his-third-wife's-name, you say to her, pleasant like 'How about dinner tonite, you know, blow a number, have some sex'

And she says, 'How can you live so frivolously? Will you never grow up? We're not hippies anymore. ISIS is loose upon the world, China is into expansionism, and the planet is in meltdown due to global warming' ... or something like that.

And you see the look of fear in her beautiful beautiful face, the anxiousness, and you are sad, very very sad because you know she means it, believes it. And you ask yourself where did she go, that girl you knew? And who is this crone that now looks out from behind her beautiful blue eyes.

I can never quite fathom this argument. I look at the time, it's just after midday. In five-six hours the sun will set. I don't think ISIS is gunna get here before sunset, or even before tomorrow. And China can't expand across the whole pacific in a single night. At least, not establish a beach head. And even if they did, our great country is not going to call on either of us two immediately for our services.

So .. we have today and tonite with nothing better to do. Why spend it worrying? That's the bit I don't understand, why can't we accept the things we cannot change and only worry when we can change something?

[Sediba]

My Father had a friend called Nasrudin. At least he said he had a friend called Nasrudin. I don't always believe my Father. One day, thru a mixup, a number of cockups and general incompetence all round, Nasrudin found himself appointed to the position of the Kings Portent Advisor. This was an important position and high up in court circles. But mainly it meant, to Nasrudin anyway, a fine robe, comfortable quarters and good food. Great food, food of a quality that Nasrudin had never experienced before. Nasrudin had a passion for the groceries and he could put them away as fast as they were put on the counter.

He grew fatter and rounder and even more indolent than before as month followed month. One day the King called him and asked him what portents he saw for the future. This question caught Nasrudin somewhat off guard. as he had no idea what the future held. Had not given it a passing thought. But Kings are not to be trifled with. He started to mumble a bit about the weather, how war was threatening in the neighbouring states, there was an over supply of dates on a depressed market, and such like other common places. But the King broke in and said, 'Nasrudin, as chief portent teller to myself, the King, I want a bit more from you than yesterdays stale news. If you don't have something positive for me by tonight then I will have your head served to the dogs on a platter'.

As I said Nasrudin had become a plump little fellow, and as the portent of the King's words sunk into his brain, little ripples of terror ran jellylike up and down his pudgy frame.

That night the king called again for Nasrudin and asked him what portents he saw. Nasrudin was petrified, but he turned to the north and said in a loud voice that he saw hordes of uncivilised Huns pouring down towards this very kingdom. They were coming down like wolves upon the fold and their cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.

The King blanched visibly, and so did all the courtiers too. Nasrudin even scared himself. But he turned implacably to the east, and there he saw battalions of Marmalukes arising from Egypt like a plague of locusts. They too were coming this way.

Now there was great fear and tremor at the king's table and dinner grew cold. But Nasrudin had not finished yet. To the south the Nubians had formed an almighty army and they were marching night and day towards this kingdom, to avenge old wrongs. And to the west? Mongolian Orcs, in numbers to vast to tell ... and they too were determined in their single united purpose to lay waste to the King's Kingdom.

The King collapsed, half the courtiers fainted and the other half ran around banging into each other. Nasrudin hid under a table, fear filled in the belief that the portents he had seen were true. He had fallen for his own sales pitch. When the turmoil had subsided a little, the king, a broken man, looked to Nasrudin and said, 'Nasrudin, how is it you can see such things?'

'It's easy' Nasrudin replied, 'All you need is fear, and', he added, 'it doesn't have to be yours in order to suffer from it'

We all live in fear. Fear is the cattle prod inside us that keeps an eye out for danger, because we are heedless, quick to relax, and otherwise slightly stupid. Fear is our guardian angel. It is an absolutely necessary selection trait that continues working while we go off duty.

Unfortunately, and only in the higher species, those with bigger brains, (I'm afraid I must include man in this group) fear can be taken well beyond it's context. That is the ability to react, to be prodded into action, should danger threaten. But the big brain bastards can see fear in their own imaginations. They look to the north, and all is doom, to the east, the south, the west, and it is a desolation ruled by savages. The curse has come upon them in their mind.

The fact is we have little use for fear today in our activities. No Leopard is in a branch above us, no sabre-tooth cat hidden behind the bushes. But the fear is still there exercising itself on petty things for no good reason, just so that it is fit and prepared. These imaginary fears have real effects on our precarious mental state. Anxiety about the future is engendered in our mother's milk these days. We fear fear itself! We die from the stress alone.

And this in spite of the statistics that 99% of our fears never come true, are never realised. Why have we done this? Why have we engendered fear in our imaginations to the point that anxiety and depression prevent us from enjoying the moment, the now, because we are driven to resolve the unknown future that our fear paints for us. And so each present moment, instead of being given to the pleasures of that moment, is consumed worrying about an imaginary unknown destiny. Would it really matter what our destiny is? We can't alter it so why sacrifice enjoyment, pleasure in the here and now, for something that will most probably never occur, and even if it does we can't cross that bridge till we reach it anyway.

We overdo it because a big brain is no guarantee that the owner is not a fool, and that's the simple facts. We are clever fools, whereas other lesser brained species are not so clever, and correspondingly less foolish. They have very little imagination. They can enjoy the moment. I lean towards them, my fellow monkeys. If you don't enjoy today because you are so consumed with worrying about tomorrow then guess what? Today will end and it will never come again, and nothing will have changed in your giant worried brain by sunset, except that one more precious day will have slipped away forever.

Make intimate love, eat good food, drink good wine, enjoy sunshine and good music ... your fears abandon.

Carpe Diem. Nothing less.

[Sediba]

Eric Arthur Blair was filled with an unknown fear. To conquer it he had been driven to heroic acts. He was a brave man and volunteered to fight for the Left in the Spanish civil war. He was shot thru the throat by a sniper. He lived. He carried out many brave acts in his life and suffered terrible hardship. And all in order to conquer an inner fear, his own. To show a stiff upper lip. He feared Totalitarianism, a form of agoraphobia.

He was dead by the age of forty six. From birth to the age of nine he had no contact with his father, who worked in the east for one of the British East India quangos. He had been bought up by his mother in the the company of an older and a younger sister. His best friend and confidante in his early years was a neighbouring girl. At University he performed poorly, and was mostly involved in writing college magazines. From there his parents sent him to the east to be a policeman. He served in Burma. And in Burma he became known as an outsider among his fellow officers. He had gone a bit native. He mixed with the Burmese, sharing their passions and their prejudices.

Dengue fever bought him back to England and there he quit the Burmese Police. Now he went native in London, choosing to sleep in doss houses and dressed as a tramp. From there he went to Paris and lived as a plongeur in that city. A plongeur is the lowest of the low. Picture a famous restaurant. It's the late 1920s. The restaurant has a famous chef and kitchen staff. They too must eat. So there exists another kitchen, which also has a good chef and good kitchen staff ... their sole purpose is to cook meals for the higher Chef and staff who serve the public. And there is another kitchen, more cramped, more dirty if that is possible, a lesser kitchen, to feed these people too. And so on down the line. All dine in order of decreasing precedence. At the bottom, the lowest kitchen, beneath even those staff, there existed a dishwasher/cleaners position called plongeur. He who suffers any burden. In Paris Blair worked as a plongeur. He fell seriously ill.

He returned to England and became a teacher at a boy's school, living with his parents for the next five years. He suffered a further illness. He was hopelessly inept with women. Once attempting to grope his wife's best friend behind a bush in the yard. This did lasting damage to the women and also to him. In his book, A Clergyman's Daughter, the protagonist is similarly groped. But a kind hearted face is put upon the attacker, he is painted as a jovial womaniser who means no harm, the woman foolishly took it the wrong way. It was attempted rape. But this is Blair exculpating his own actions by downplaying them through his characters.

He was inept in his finances. He was sickly. He had no understanding of women, that is, 50% of the population. He was agoraphobic. He lived in extraordinary times, the depression, WWII and he saw the world through these times. He self flagellated his way through life. He undertook hardship, real hardship, for no apparent reason other than research in verisimilitude.

When his Publisher, Cyril Connelly pressed him for the 'Road to Wigan Pier' he told them he couldn't start it until he had spent all his money. It was a book commissioned around the hardship of poverty in the industrial regions of England. And when he finally set out to write it he owned not a penny. If he was going to write about beggars then he must live like one, with no backup in order to escape if the going became too hard.


Now why is it, and I ask this question of all who read this, why does a person who is so ill equipped in life feel it is their bounden duty to inform us of the pitfalls that lie ahead, firm in the belief that only they can see them correctly? And why do we believe them.

If they were to examine their own inner selves from a short distance they would see a poorly designed, ill-fitting, inept, paranoid chaos which fills them with fear and anxiety. This is their life. And yet it is these people who believe they know better. Not only do they know better but they truly believe they are doing us all a favour by warning us of their own imagined future states. They are benefactors to us lesser mortals. And yet, somewhere in some other badly written book (we can't blame Blair for this one) it says, 'Remove the beam from your own eye before attempting to remove the splinter from your brothers'

Of course, when you have a big brain that dwells in high spheres, intent on high purpose, searching for that elusive ethereal universal consciousness in order to quell a primitive unjustified fear, then it's very easy to overlook the tree trunk that cataracts your own sight. It's perfectly understandable, I'm sure you see it that way too. Anyone could be excused for such a simple mistake.

Personally, in Blair's case, I blame his second wife Sonia. She it was who bought him to the modern world's attention. If she had left well enough alone then he would have remained, like John the Baptist an hallucinogenic misfit, wailing in the wilderness and whose strictures we hear not nor heed. Perhaps someone, grown tired of his wailing like Salome grew tired of the Baptist, may have mercifully cut off his head.

But there you have it. It's not enough that Blair was a dismal phart, that alone can be accepted. Who lets these people loose on us, and why o why do we give them credence?

When Sonia married Blair he was in his hospital bed with three months left to live. He was impotent. And yet he was marrying one of the most beautiful women in the world. Sonia had beauty of face and form that scores a higher-than-10 ... she also had deep unresolved mental issues. She was a bitter, twisted, pushy unlikable person, with a number of disastrous liaisons behind her and more in front yet to occur. But ultimately we cannot be too harsh, because she was also a noble person. And she displayed this nobility in her unrelenting attempts to bring Blair to the world. She did not act selfishly. She died a pauper.

By now we should have guessed that 'George Orwell' is the pseudonym for Eric Arthur Blair. That is the name he wrote under.

GEORGE ORWELL







SONIA ORWELL

Was he any good? Did he write any good books? Well mostly they were rubbish. 1984 and Animal Farm are mainly paranoid agoraphobic fears put to pen. Unjustified. They never came true. Ahhhh ... but you say, your quoting in hindsight. No I'm not. Orwell projected those books into the future, he made predictions. We are the future and we have the right to judge, there is no hindsight in this case. Orwell's time is now. And he fails.

He had mistaken the beginning of a new world for a direct road to totalitarianism. He had warned us of it and put the fear of god into nearly every reader. But it wasn't the beginnings of totalitarianism at all. It was the beginning of globalisation. In 1984 and Animal Farm there is no GDP, no economy, power is the weapon, the tool that brings us to servitude.

But you have to have a GDP, an economy, even to pull off a totalitarian state. Now you can do that in fiction and get away with it. But you can't do that in reality. The economy will let you down. And so it must be adapted along the way to meet it's liabilities and adapted and adapted until the outcome is no longer a totalitarian state as the result but globalisation.

This is where he was shortsighted. But then he had no skills in these matters. He was filled with fear, anxiety. After all, Heaven is a Totalitarian State by definition. A totalitarian state is just one that has an Overlord

[Sediba]

So could he write?

Of all his ramblings (Burmese Days) his boring rubbish (Inside the whale and other stories), his ill-informed fears (1984, Animal Farm) he did write some great books.

He wrote three and a half good books, great books. It is my intention to review these three and a half novels. Two of them I have only read once or twice at most, and that more than thirty years ago. The other one and a half I reread every few years or so.

I'll deal with the two lesser novels first. These two books Orwell was never happy with. He left instructions that they should never be reprinted.

A Clergyman's Daughter:

Dorothy is daughter to the Rector of Knype hill. He is an old curmudgeon. She is a virginal simple non-devious person. Innocent in the ways of the world. She practices self-mortification each time she believes she has done something wrong. She pricks her finger with a needle if she forgets something, more times, more pricks. She won't light the fire as punishment to herself for some earlier minor misdemeanour. And the temperature outside is below zero and the wind is howling. (shades of Orwell here) She goes about the village doing good works and trying to manage the non-existent income of her father against the clamouring shopkeepers and their bills.

An old womanising lecher from the village invites her to tea. She goes. He tries to grope her. She is appalled and repulses him. He is not much put out. But Dorothy is traumatised and has a sort of breakdown. She wakes up in London with no memory. She falls in with a gang of youths, mixed sex. They are on the breadline and spend their time in petty theft in order to survive. They are on their way south to the hop-fields of Kent.

Nightly they sleep in hay barns together for warmth. Animal groping and fondling goes on through the night and relieves the daily tensions of the group. Dorothy yields to all this. They reach Kent and spend long hours working in the hop-fields. At night, exhausted, they collapse in their quarters. Despite the hard work, the terrible conditions, Dorothy is experiencing her first ever freedom in life. And the group becomes a warm family to her. The group is functioning as a single unit, a primal tribe. Dorothy is a fully functioning unit of the tribe. And yet a month, two months ago, she had never had sex. She was a sophisticated country spinster with deep religious convictions. Now she is a primal animal, healthier, happier.

In just a few months. Think about that. This is where the book shines.

Orwell knew that sophistication, civilisation, and all we stood for was just a veneer. Strip it by applying pressure and we were animal still. This is a good thing. But he feared it because he saw that the bullies would rise to the top, hence his agoraphobia of totalitarianism. He feared it and spent his life miserably in anticipation of it. But if he had embraced it his life would have been well balanced and he would have been happy. What he had not allowed for was the coalition-of-the-weak, that is the whole tribe's united opposition to the bully.


Through a newspaper article Dorothy is made aware of who she is. She tries to contact her father. But by now he blames her for all the search publicity and wild newspaper articles that surround her disappearance. He blames her for the whole thing. The village has been poisoned by gossip regarding Dorothy. Eventually she returns to the village and is welcomed by only the old reprobate, the lecher. He is her only friend. Dorothy settles back into doing good works. She refuses an offer of marriage from the old lecher, who is also very rich. She has lost her faith, yet still ministers to the church and the congregation.

She has found a road to contentment.

As boring as the above plot may sound, and the novel really drags in places .. this is a good read. Not the least reason being that it contains a sort of oral history of how people, ordinary people, lived in those times. Of the hardships they had to overcome daily. It contains detail. And it is a novel of uplift.

It is not in the class of a really good book. For example, Angus Wilson's 'Late Call' which deals with a similar theme. This too is a book dealing with agoraphobia, the wasteland. The heroine is Sylvia, an old fat lady, who moves in retirement to a New Town where her son is the principle of the school. New Towns were a social experiment in England that failed. New Towns one could liken to compartmentalised totalitarian mini-states in their regulatory rectangular order of all things. Sylvia passes through many trials but ultimately survives to live life from a new found viewpoint. The characterisation in Late Call of the heroine is superb. She could step from the page. We all know her, we can all associate with her. She receives a late call to a new life, and this call is one to adventure.

A Clergyman's Daughter is simply not in the class of a novel like Late Call. Nevertheless it is a very rewarding read. Both novels are unsettling, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting. I recommend both novels

A Clergyman's Daughter is available free from Project Gutenberg

[Sediba]

Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

Well. This is a difficult novel to recommend. This novel too contains brief scenes of the author exculpating his own sexual inadequacy by justifying it in his characters. It is also a novel written in fear of the totalitarian state. But in this novel money is the mover towards this state.

Our hero, Gordon, decides to reject money. And here i quote from the Wiki because I can.

Wiki:
Gordon Comstock has 'declared war' on what he sees as an 'overarching dependence' on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called 'New Albion—at which he shows great dexterity—and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so he can write poetry.

But his self-imposed poverty (once again the shades of the author) leads to a life of misery and depression. His friends find it difficult to associate with him in his chosen squalor. But he won't lift himself out by taking his regular job back. His girlfriend suffers the most. Rosemary, who won't have sex with him till they are married, cannot come to terms with his decision.

However she clings on until finally repulsed by Gordon, who has lost a very lowly job and sunk even further into the pit of depression known as poverty. Finally in desperation to help him she agrees to have sex. They find a field but Gordon does not have any contraception device. Rosemary refuses without one. Gordon blames even this on money. She leaves him. He sinks further. He has a rich mate who feels sorry for him and tries to help. His rich mate has a beautiful girlfriend, Hermione, who despises Gordon and is contemptuous of him. Gordon feels it. He gets drunk and in a fight and is thrown in jail. His rich mate pays the fine and he is released.

He sinks into absolute squalor, the cheapest unsanitary room he can find. Then Rosemary shows up. She forces herself upon him, smelly and unshaven as he is. She is a virgin. They have sex, unpleasant and without passion. Then she leaves him forever.

He is without hope and apparently unable to do anything about it though it is all his own choice. This dismal dreary part of the novel goes on for sometime.

Then Rosemary shows up again. She has something to tell him.

And the novel starts to lift. Gordon reaches out for life. He is arising from the bottommost depths. He is coming up for air and the sun is shining. He abandons all his marxist principles .... and life becomes a beach.

This is a really good book. Slow and dreary, but characterisation is very well done. The minute detail of the flea pits and houses he lodges in, the cockroaches and the putrid squalor, are so well done you can feel it, you can smell it.

This too is a novel ultimately of great hope and joy.


Keep the Aspidistra Flying is available free from Project Gutenberg

[Sediba]

So now we come to the last two novels, or more correctly the one and a half novels. These are easily his best works.

Down and Out in Paris and London:

The first half of this novel takes place in Paris, and as the title says, the second half in London.

When you purchase this novel you must buy the complete novel. You can't just buy half. To solve this, once you have purchased the novel you open it and lay it flat at the middle page, the divide between Paris and London. Then you take your meat cleaver and you cleave the book in two. The right hand half, that about London, you throw in the trash, or use it for fire-starters. It's rubbish.

But the first half of the novel is pure treasure.


Basically Orwell finds himself living on the breadline in Paris in the late twenties. The world is about to enter the depression. He eventually obtains a job as a plongeur, a drudge, a kitchen hand. But the street he lives in, though squalid and decrepit contains some of the most amazing characters you will ever meet. All of them poverty stricken. It is a comedy and also a tragedy. It is hilarious.

I won't go on about this because I don't want to spoil it should you wish to read it.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

THE rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

MADAME MONCE: '_Salope! Salope!_ How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? _Putain! Salope!_'

THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: '_Vache!_'

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there-- but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles,and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street.

It was a very narrow street--a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny _bistros_, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

This is a really really wonderful read. if not for the descriptions, then purely for the characters who inhabit it.


Down and out in Paris and London is available free from Project Gutenberg

[Sediba]

Coming up for AIr


This last novel, Coming up for Air, I consider to be the best of all. However this is not the popular view. For many people there is a dark portent in this novel, the shades of war, of totalitarianism, that are impossible to dispel. War is coming and this shadows the book.

But none of this actually arrives in time for the book's ending. Also, it is just a shadow, it does not take up much of the novel. It plays no part in the novel itself. But because the hero takes a stroll down memories lane in the shade of war the book can be read as futile and depressing.

But that shouldn't affect us, the war is over, the goodies won. We can read it in a less depressing light.

Georgy is a fat middle-aged bastard. An insurance broker, year around 1939. He owns a rickety old wreck of a car. He is not well off. His wife a worried anxious nervous nagging women. His two kids too boisterous. There is little spare cash to meet all their needs.

Georgy backs a winner at the races. He doesn't tell his wife, nor pay any pressing bills. He enjoys it. He thinks about how he will spend it. He has never done this before.

A whore, nah ... too quick. A holiday, he could tell his wife he'd been sent on a country run. But where ... he enjoys considering all the options. Eventually he decides to revisit his home in Lower Binfield, where he had grown up.

But everything has changed.

WIKI
He recalls a particular pond with huge fish in it which he had missed the chance to try and catch thirty years previously. He plans to return to Lower Binfield but when he arrives, he finds the place unrecognisable. Eventually he locates the old pub where he is to stay, finding it much changed. His home has become a tea shop. Only the church and vicar appear the same but he has a shock when he discovers an old girlfriend, for in his eyes she has been so ravaged by time that she is almost unrecognisable and is utterly devoid of the qualities he once adored. She fails to recognise him at all.

... and the secluded and once hidden pond that contained the huge carp he always intended to take on with his fishing rod, but never got around to, has become a rubbish dump. The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem distant.

The concept of "you can't go home again" hangs heavily over Bowling's journey

But the stories of his childhood as he revisits each place are enchanting. A free innocent kid running round the countryside, free of worry, free of care. The charm of the countryside, the sunshine, the green fields, are all in the book. In Georgy's memories. I find nothing negative in the book at all. However that is not the popular view.

For me it is sentimental, nostalgic, funny, and a rare insight into what it was like to be a child in those times. All good things. And by far the cheeriest of all Orwell's books.

This book goes into my top-ten Deserted Island echelon bag.

Coming up for Air is available free from Project Gutenberg

[mipela]

Sediba.
When we met recently at Kafe Zac I could see you were, to some extent, a kindred soul. During our time together several times I glimpsed the soul within the body. I likes what I saw. Despite having had some insights into your persona via your inputs on TSO, I am amazed and impressed with your insights into the shadowy, twilight side of the human psyche. Via a past Writer’s Course, I had my nose rubbed in George Orwell - I came away impressed, sufficiently so that I downloaded a book of his essays. I found these essays to be magical stuff. I read 1984 back in the early 70’s but when I returned to it recenctly, I found it was all jaded, we’d moved on. It was of the long lost past.
I couldn’t get into it and put it back in the bookshelf.

Your critique here of some of Orwell’s work leaves me in awe of your ability to see into literature and explain its content, place and relevance.
Very insightful indeed.
Kind regards,
Mipela.

[Sediba]

Jun 11, 2016 8:28:10 GMT 10 mipela said:

Sediba.
I am amazed and impressed with your insights into the shadowy, twilight side of the human psyche.
Kind regards,
Mipela.

Thank you for very kind comments Mip.

I intend to review ten books. I am pretending that I have been ordered off to a deserted Island. I have been allowed to pack, but only ten books will fit in my bag. Ten songs, ten poems, ten women, and ten base items of food. The rest has to be all make-believe that the deserted island and it's lush tropical flora and fauna must supply.

In the my top ten list of books, so far only one has been packed. 'Coming up for Air, by George Orwell.

PS: If anyone is wondering about the ten women I'm packing in my suitcase, well so far only one selection has been made. Viva King, a bohemian from the 1920s. She published an autobiography called 'The weeping and the laughter, 1976. But googling her, or trying to find her book is impossible. The internet has overlooked her so far. She was a sophisticated, sensual, open addict of life and sex played a big part in her addiction. We will here more about her as these reviews progress.

I now move on to my second terrible book review.