*****                                                                                                                                           "One of my all-time favorite books, and one of Orwell's best."  September 4, 2005
                  Reviewer: Alexiel (United States) - See all my reviews

  But be warned: I think nowadays this book is more suitable for three groups of readers: those who have an interest in novels of the picaresque; those with a historical interest in Paris, or to a lesser extent, London; or general fans of George Orwell's fine works.

This is a great novel for so many reasons. It gives you a historical sense of the picaresque novel. Before Chuck Palahnuik, Chuck Bukowski, or even William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were writing stories about the tragic/comedy/just plain interesting adventures of the down-and-out, George Orwell was here. This book can be seen as a blueprint for more recent works - it has definite parallels and similarities with Burroughs' "Junky," Bukowski's "Factotum," and even Palahnuik's "Fight Club."

It's also a great historical work. It is largely autobiographical. The adventures of poor artists in Paris has long been a fascinating, and autobiographical, subject in literature. From the drug binges of Charles Baudelaire, to the fictional-but-based-in-true-experience of the poverty-wracked (among others) faithfully portrayed by Balzac, to Picasso and Modigliani's frolics in Montmartre, to Louis-Ferdinand Celine's justifiable famous portrayal of World War I Paris (and other environs) in his tour-de-force "Journey To The End of the Night," to Henry Miller's debauchery in the city of lights as most famously noted in "The Tropic Of Cancer," Orwell's novel here has many peers (Henry Miller was one) and precedents. If any of these subjects interest you, then I suggest you check out this book.

It's also good for Orwell fans in general, and it contains more of his trademark warmth and cynicism; his segues into politics; and his tongue-in-cheek examination of the bizarre and absurd.

Finally, this is just a great book, period. This novel is based on a time in his life when he dropped out of respectable society and moved into a ramshackle residental hotel in Paris to get a taste of lower class Parisian life. His experiences as a poverty-stricken hotel restaurant worker are stirring, gripping, absurd, tragic, and comedic. They run the gamut of emotions with a cast of many odd characters of every walk of life: hustlers, exiled Russians, meglomaniacal cooks, Oscar Wilde-emulating starving artists, and many more. As others have noted, the breakneck, full-throttle insanity of Paris is much more fun to read about than the staid, rather boring London. It's like going from San Francisco to Salt Lake City (no offense to those hailing from Utah). Even though this book was written long ago, it's highly readable, and a fantastic insight into the human condition, of what it means to be human in a certain period of time, and how people live their lives and get by in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

I highly recommend that everyone read this book.

  "DOWN AND OUT                     IN PARIS AND LONDON"

 BY GEORGE ORWELL

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