Customer Reviews

Down and Out in Paris and London

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Be advised that the Harcourt edition appears to be the original edited version. As such the passages on slang end up containing a lot of "-----" which is interesting from the perspective of censorship in the 1930s, but is clearly contrary to the authors intent. Before purchasing a copy check the third or fourth page of chapter 32 for the following passage:

"The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun is ..."

This book reads much more like a memoir than the novel it is, and indeed it is a largely autobiographical work. Orwell begins with an anonymous narrator describing daily life in the poorer parts of Paris during the early 1900s. He describes the din, the dirt, the bugs, and all else in vivid detail. The narrator, an Englishman by birth, is living in Paris and running low on funds. We follow him through various attempts to earn money, including work as a lowly dishwasher or "plongeur" in the city's hotels, and also in one dubious restaurant. We learn all the dirty behind-the-scenes secrets of these operations, and it's quite enough to make one's skin crawl and cause one to avoid hotels and restaurants forever.

The second half of the book follows the narrator back to his native England, where he must find a way to get by in London while awaiting a permanent job. Here we are introduced to the tramp's way of life - vagrancy, begging, and sleeping in the cheapest (and filthiest) accomodations available. But we also get to know some of the narrator's fellow tramps, and to feel for them. They are not all the worthless, lazy scum that the higher classes of the time would paint them as. Orwell concludes the book with a brief treatise on the vagrant's plight and ways in which it can be eased, as well as making the tramp a usefull part of society.

Obviously Orwell's closing call-to-action is not entirely relevant anymore, as the workings of society have changed somewhat over the last century, but the book is nevertheless fascinating. A reader may at first be a little thrown off by the lack of a central plot, but once past this it is easy to get sucked into the world Orwell has illustrated here. His imagery is so striking that you actually feel as if you are sharing the narrator's experiences. You can feel the intense heat of the hotel kitchens, feel the weakness and weariness that comes with malnutrition, smell the grease and the sweat and the dirt.

And yet, as bleak as all this sounds, the book is not depressing. The narrator never lapses into dejection or self-pity, and the reader is left with a sense of hope throughout the novel. Being poor is not presented as a dead end - there are always ways to get by, some of them quite ingenious. And the narrator is even able to find humor in some of the truly absurd situations he finds himself in.

Any fan of Orwell's works will not be disappointed with this book. Or even if you've read nothing by Orwell (in which case you absolutely must pick up "1984" at some point), and merely want a glimpse into the life of the poor and jobless at this point in history, this is the book for you. And the fact that the narrator is anonymous (although the story is largely based on Orwell's life, the narrator is not, as some reviewers have claimed, Orwell himself) helps us imagine that he could be anyone, and that even we could be living this life. It's fairly short and easy to read, but opens up a whole world - one that is rarely contemplated in much detail - with it's rich descriptions. Definitely a recommended read.

Ostensibly a novel, this book is Orwell's thinly fictional account of a time he spent "slumming it" in Paris and London. Orwell had read and greatly admired Jack London's book, "People of the Abyss" (1902), which chronicled his time spent among the wretched poor of London at the turn of the century. In the prewar '30s Orwell followed London's journalistic example, and voluntarily entered the ranks of the barely surviving in Paris. His account is rich in it's evocation of sights, sounds, and characters of this day-to-day existence. When he isn't unemployed and pawning his clothes, he works 12-18 hour days as a "plongeur" (dishwasher/gopher) at various hotels and restaurants. It's a pretty awful never-ending cycle of poverty to be caught in, as Orwell's books amply demonstrates. He ends his Paris section by speaking directly to the reader about the reasons for such poverty. Rather than claim any kind of nobility in poverty, he points out that the terrible jobs he and his friends perform are largely useless work and can be easily made obsolete. Later he moves over to London and joins the ranks of the homeless tramps. This section is less vivid and strong, and is better as a simple sociological study of homelessness in Edwardian England. He somewhat awkwardly inserts a lot of info about slang which is interesting, but somewhat tangential. The extreme policies he decries here have been replaced by the modern welfare state economy. Altogether, it's an interesting journalistic/sociological exercise with some strong statements.

Like most of us, I read Orwell in high school ("Animal Farm" and "1984") and remained largely unaware that hed written anything that didnt involve either talking Trotskyite animals or a terrifyingly functional dystopia. A friend of mine gave me Down and Out in Paris and London a month ago, and I was unable to put it down until I was done. In what is basically the chronicle of a couple of months of self-induced misery, Orwell explodes a lot of myths surrounding poverty and the spirit-breaking labor that is, for many, the only exit from it.

We know the gist of the book: Orwell sets up shop amongst the common people, first washing dishes in various Paris restaurants and then tramping around London and environs. Proceeding via introductions and anecdotes--some hilariously funny, others downright heart-rending--Down and Out in Paris and London offers a detailed tour of a side of life that most of us will only ever read about. From the painstaking descriptions of exactly what kind of muck is to be found on the floor of a restaurants kitchen in 1920s and 1930s Paris (you dont want to know, but he tells you) to elaborations on how to skirt begging laws in London and the dangers associated with such living, Orwell makes his points, one after the other. To his credit, though, there is little dogmatic moralizing; when, at the end of the book, he tells you what hes learned, he doesnt seem to feel the need to shove down the readers throat what is clearly stuck in his own. The feeling is strong, though, that youd have to be blind, crazy or both, not to reach the same conclusions.

The greatest strength of Down and Out, though, is the manner in which Orwell never attempts to pass himself off as one of the people he is pretending to be. The English band Pulp has a song about rich kids slumming with the common people, but the song points out that, if the going ever really got tough, the rich kids can always call Daddy and have him bail them out. Orwell has to realize that he is in that same privileged situation; his tramping in London, for example, is simply to kill time until he can take up a legitimate position, and, along the way, he is able to borrow money several times from a friend in order to make ends meet. This distance that he subtly maintains between himself and those who have little choice in their fate only adds punch to the lessons he learns, and Orwells probably privileged reader (at least privileged enough to spend money on books) is permitted to learn alongside him.

There are picky complaints that could be lodged here--the untranslated French passages, for example, which will leave at a loss those without high school French--but, overall, Down and Out in Paris and London is a great read, one of those few books that manages to be both entertaining and properly disturbing. It has all the wit and scoop of later efforts like Bourdains recent best-seller, Kitchen Confidential, or Ehrenreichs Nickel and Dimed, but Down and Out, after bigger game than Bourdain and less unforgivably preachy than Ehrenreich, manages to dig deeper under your skin and stay there longer. And that, as Orwell concludes, is a beginning.

Surprisingly, I hadn't read any of Orwell's books before. Instead of starting with '1984', I decided on this one.

Orwell paints a stark and totally realistic portrait of the life of a vagrant in Paris and London. He captures the mannerisms and desperation of men who want a better lot in life, but cannot get it because society has turned its back on them. I almost felt like I was there with Orwell as he stayed in lodging houses, worked menial jobs, and plotted his next move to get some food and shelter. That is probably the highest compliment an author can get.

My only quibble with the book is that the London portion of the book was significantly less entertaining than the Paris portion. Towards the end of the book, Orwell slips into a lot oof preaching about how to improve the lives of tramps, and this drags down the flow of the novel a bit. Plus, he doesn't seem to run into the same sorts of wild and crazy characters that he did in Paris. Perhaps it is because of less diversity in London, but it still dragged a bit.

That being said, this is a great book, and can still shed light on the plight of the impoverished today.

This book has become "Literature" with a capital L for the right reasons, because it's brilliant and a work of art, etc. I do not have the arrogance to use Amazon as a forum to critique a work by Orwell.

I only want to add that I am working on several restaurants in NYC as an architect, and I have brought this book along to meetings and given several copies to clients to show them other ways of looking at their business. It is easy to talk about being in someone else's shoes when that other person is "down and out," but Orwell manages to sympathetically explore aspects of extreme conditions with incredible empathy. And little pandering or sentimentality. It is not quit poverty he is describing as much as the driving oppression of a job -- especially in the restaurants (and hotel restaurants.)

This is why I've discussed the book with those clients. The business has hardly changed in eighty odd years, especially in any way that means anything to the people that are working washing dishes or cleaning hotel silverware. Reading some passages and have them shocked with recognition even now is remarkable.

...of the human condition. He paints the tramps he meets as neither heroes nor villains, but as individuals with the same qualities and faults as everyone else. This realistic, as opposed to idealized, approach radiates freshness 75 years later. Down and Out is neither an anti-capitalist screed nor an homage to socialism, but that rarest of objects, a true book.

In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell brings to life the tales of people experiencing poverty in Paris and London.
I thought he beautifully described his life in Paris as a plongeur at Hotel X where he worked in a filthy 110 degree cellar for long hours, only to be paid about 20 francs a day. He had to trade his clothes into a pawn shop just to eat.
In London, Orwell lived his life as a tramp, living in hostels called spikes and suffering from complete boredom. There he meets a man named Paddy, who lives in the spike with him, and Bozo, who teaches him about street beggars.
Overall this was a great book. I love it how Orwell adds true stories from other plongeurs or tramps in order for us to further understand life in poverty.
"It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty-it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping." -G. Orwell

A modest book void of foul language sex and violence, yet a masterpiece all the same.
Anyone who has been through adversity or poverty would find the book almost too honest to accept. Anyone who hasnt should be glad that one man can take you this close without having to leave the life youve been accustomed to.
A true literary genius.

DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON shows the dark seedy side of one of the two most cosmopolitan cities in Europe and England. There is no glamour in George Orwell's depiction, but rather a taste of the raw and real side of poverty that occupies the lives of the lower and working class citizens and immigrants that sought opportunity in Paris and in London. Surprisingly, these were educated and former civil servants of their respective countries who happened to meet unfortunate circumstances, such as falling to illness or dropping out of society. Orwell observes that poverty does not discriminate.

Indeed, this is an autobiographical account of how Orwell lived as a struggling writer during the 1920s and 1930s where he literally lived a life that may have compared to a Dickensian novel, but with a little more wit and subtle cynicism. The life in the city and the unpredictable events that occur while scrounging for something to eat or scrimping by with few a shillings or francs in order to survive. Orwell succeeds in blending humor and irony in situations that usually do not accompany undesirable situations.

Orwell presents an array of characters with great vividness. Through the art of fiction, Orwell writes in the first-person and accounts the people and places he encountered. Of all the characters mentioned, Boris and Bozo were the most memorable. In Paris, Boris, a roommate, fellow vagrant and writer, former Captain in the Russian Army before the Bolshevik Revolution, who was well read with military history -- Napoleon to Clausewitz, worked odd jobs as a waiter or maitre d' hotel at various Parisian hotel restaurants. On the outskirts of London, Orwell saw a contrasting side of poverty that appeared harsher than what he had been accustomed to in Paris. And as in Paris, Orwell came upon unusual and enlightened people, such as Bozo, a pavement artist who drew likenesses of Winston Churchill and cartoons of political parties. He was the son of a bankrupt bookseller who spoke so so French and read Zola and Shakespeare, and was considered the quintessential beggar who spent his earnings on drink.

Overall, DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND IN LONDON will entertain and entice readers. George Orwell offers reader a unique and realistic view of living on the fringes, but deeply empathizes and attempts to understand each predicament of the people and places he encounters.