A review by nohoperadio
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

3.0

Only my second Orwell since reading the obvious one as a young teen, read this via the Orwell Foundation’s free email serial. The Paris half with its descriptions of the insanity of kitchen work in the 1920s is by far the more memorable: horrifying to hear just how recently working as an unskilled wage labourer basically meant living full-time in Hell, but also fascinating to hear about the social dynamics in those very overcrowded and overworked workplaces, and the mindsets people had to cultivate to make that life livable (step one being, I guess unsurprisingly, to never not be drunk). The crazy twists of both good and bad luck that gain and lose him each job are also very entertaining.

The London half, which covers Orwell’s few months of homelessness walking from shelter to shelter, for whatever reason dragged for me (even in the very bite-size daily serial format) and not much stands out in my memory. Whether the failure is in Orwell’s ability to compellingly narrativize that particular kind of drudgery or in my own powers of imaginative sympathy, I couldn’t tell you.