Reviews with content warning for Antisemitism - Nineteen Eighty-Four

Reviews tagging 'Antisemitism'

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

54 reviews

lalu's review against another edition

first read in 2017: 4 stars
London, 1984: England is part of "Oceania", one of the three super states into which the world has been divided after the Revolution. Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth is the "correcting" of old newspaper articles on order to reflect the current political and societal sitiuation - because what the Party says is and has always been the truth. Also: Big Brother is watching you.

In this almighty surveillance state Winston tries to start a revolution and gets subsequently brain washed.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" didn't fully convince me as a novel, but the idea behind it is disturbingly impressive and shows alarming parallels to today's North Korea...

dnf'd in 2021 - Warning: strong language!

I had no urge to read this book again, but my book club chose it, so... I read 84 pages. What really struck me this time is the sexism. Already in the first chapter we encounter said sexism

He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.

... antisemitism (when describing Emmanuel Goldstein, the "Enemy of the people")

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard - a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose [...]. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality.

... and murder and rape fantasies about a female colleague

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax [...]. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her.

This could be seen as stylistic choices or whatever - but I hated it!

Content Warnings

ghostpath's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

jnotaham's review against another edition

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reflective medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

bluejayreads's review against another edition

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dark

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Original 2011 rating: 1 star

2021 review:

I first read 1984 in high school. Being homeschooled, there wasn't any discussion or context for it, my mother just handed me a list of classic books she read in high school and told me to have at it. I remember very few of the books I read off that list, but I do remember I hated 1984. Absolutely loathed it. I read a lot of dystopian back then, but it was young adult dystopian where there were rebellions and the heroic protagonists overthrew the evil government by the end of the trilogy. A dystopian book where the protagonist wasn't "good" and the evil government won was inconceivable to me. Plus there was sex in this, and I was very much not comfortable with that.

I picked it up again because I read Brave New World, another classic dystopian written a little bit earlier, and I wanted to compare the two. I didn't end up doing a lot of comparing, though, because I ended up reexperiencing the story. With the benefits of being not a sheltered high schooler and having enough adult awareness to see the many ways the world is screwed up (and the maturity to not immediately throw the book in the "not suitable for Good Christian Readers" pile the instant sex is mentioned), I was able to read it in a whole new light.

From endless wars where the enemy changes but the demand for patriotism doesn't to constant government surveillance to strong stratification between upper and lower classes, much of this book maps directly onto my modern experience. The Party has a distinctly communist feel, but I don't know if that's because George Orwell actually feared the oppression would come from communism or because he just took a lot of imagery and ideas from the Soviet Union to make it. (Wikipedia suggests he just opposed totalitarianism in all forms, not specifically communism.) I found the telescreens used to both broadcast and spy highly ironic, because I'm pretty sure TVs don't have the technology to broadcast our actions or words back to anyone but our phones sure do and we voluntarily take them everywhere.

You can read this as an interesting dystopian with elements of current reality, or you can let it make you really depressed. I went back and forth on how I was experiencing it. But I finally understand why this is a book people make high schoolers read.

Since this is a reread, this review has more been about my changing understanding of the book than the book itself. It is well written, with a solid world dominated by a totalitarian government and a fairly unlikeable narrator that you manage to root for anyway, and a really horrifying amount of brainwashing torture that spans roughly the last third of the book. It's quite good, and shockingly prescient considering it was published 72 years ago. I don't think it's one that I'll reread repeatedly, but reading it with adult eyes was definitely worthwhile.

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