Homage to Catalonia (Paperback)

~ (Author) "IN THE Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table..." (more)
Key Phrases: horrible atmosphere, party militias, Civil Guards, Popular Army, Communist Party (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets." Most war correspondents observe wars and then tell stories about the battles, the soldiers and the civilians. George Orwell--novelist, journalist, sometime socialist--actually traded his press pass for a uniform and fought against Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War during 1936 and 1937. He put his politics and his formidable conscience to the toughest tests during those days in the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain. Then, after nearly getting killed, he went back to England and wrote a gripping account of his experiences, as well as a complex analysis of the political machinations that led to the defeat of the socialist Republicans and the victory of the Fascists.

Review

Autobiographical account by George Orwell of his experience as a volunteer for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, published in 1938. Unlike other foreign intellectual leftists, Orwell and his wife did not join the International Brigade but instead enlisted in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista; POUM). The book chronicles both his observations of the drudgery of the daily life of a soldier and his disillusionment with political infighting and totalitarianism. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 15th printing edition (October 22, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156421178
• ISBN-13: 978-0156421171
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,656 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #7 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( O ) > Orwell, George

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Eloquent & Moving 1st-Hand Account Of The Spanish Civil War, June 29, 2005

By	Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Generalissimo Francisco Franco's fascist troops invaded Spain in July 1936 in order to overthrow the newly established Republic headed by the Popular Front, (composed of liberal democrats, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, communists and secularists). The country was basically divided into Red Spain - the Republicans, and Black Spain, represented by the landed elite, committed to a feudal system and Franco's cause, Fascists, the urban bourgeoisie, the Roman Catholic Church, and other conservative sectors. The number of casualties is only an estimate, but suggests that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed. Many of these deaths, however, were not the results of military battles, but the outcome of brutal mass executions perpetrated by both sides.

During the war in Spain, approximately 38,000 non-Spanish, anti-fascist volunteers from fifty-two countries, took up arms to defend the Republican cause against Franco, who was aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Twenty-eight hundred Americans, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fought here alongside their Spanish and international comrades-in-arms from 1937 through 1938. These men and women believed the defense of the Republic represented the last hope of stopping the spread of international fascism. Most of the volunteers were not political, but idealists who were determined to "make Madrid the tomb of fascism." English novelist, essayist, and critic, George Orwell was one of them.

Orwell was not just a writer, he was a partisan and he was a political idealist. A revolutionary Socialist, not a Communist, he was affiliated with the Independent Labor Party (I.L.P.). Orwell originally traveled to Spain in 1937 to observe and to write, but he almost immediately enlisted in the militia as a private. At that time there were several political parties in Loyalist Spain, and each party had its own militia units, soon to be absorbed into the People's Army. Because Orwell's letters of introduction were originally from the I.L.P., which had connections to the P.O.U.M. (Workers Party of Marxist Unification - a small group of anti-Stalinists), he joined a unit of that party. Most volunteers fought Fascism under one of the Communist or Socialist banners, in a coalition effort, with the intention of working through political and social differences when the war was won. Until that time, he believed that the anti-Fascists should work together in a united front.

When Orwell arrived in Barcelona, the Anarchists were still virtually in control of Catalonia. It was the first time Orwell had ever been in a town where the working class "was in the saddle." He clearly conveys the sense of excitement of seeing the city under de facto workers' control, and the intensity of the revolutionary spirit which coursed through the people. "Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted;' everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and Thou,' and said 'Salud' instead of 'Buenos Dias.'" It seemed like all men were equal, and there was hope in the air. "All this was queer and moving. There was much in it I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it almost immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for."

After the most elementary training, Orwell spent weeks of bitter cold and hardship on the Zaragoza front, but saw little action. He was briefly hospitalized with a festering hand wound, and then returned to action - and this time there was plenty of it. Orwell's description of the fighting and conditions at the front is extraordinarily vivid and chilling. He went on leave to meet his wife in Barcelona in April, and thus was in the thick of things for the P.O.U.M. uprising. The situation in Barcelona had changed drastically since those initial days when everyone appeared on equal footing. There were startling changes in the "social atmosphere." Perhaps initially, everyone had worn overalls and shouted revolutionary slogans "as a way of saving their skins." Now, smart hotels and restaurants were once again filled with the wealthy, while food prices had jumped enormously for the working-class. The poor experienced serious and recurrent shortages. The differences between the luxuries of the "haves" and the increasing poverty of the majority became obvious. On May 3 a struggle began between the syndicalist unions and the Catalonian police force. Orwell saw the issue as a clear one: "I have no particular love for the idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on." He spent three nights on the roof of a moving-picture house, watching over P.O.U.M. headquarters until troops came from Valencia, and the street fighting stopped.

After ten days back at the front Orwell received a near lethal neck wound. By the time he left the hospital he had lost his voice and all movement in his right hand. Warned by friends that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed, and many members jailed, Orwell escaped to France with his wife. He began to write "Homage To Catalonia" shortly thereafter. It is a most inspiring and eloquent account of his time fighting with the militia during the Spanish Civil War, not just from a soldiers perspective, but as an eye-witness to one of the most significant events of the 20th century. It first appeared in 1938, but was coldly received by the left-wing intelligentsia, who regarded Communists as heroes of the war. In Orwell's lifetime "Homage to Catalonia" sold only about fifty copies a year.

Many became disillusioned with communism in Spain, but kept silent fearing to harm the Loyalist cause. Orwell's take on the Communist's/Stalin's political machinations, and the overriding priority of the USSR to strengthen Soviet foreign policy, may appear obvious today, but those who put their lives on the line in Spain were much more naive. "The whole of Comintern policy is now subordinated (excusably, considering the world situation) to the defense of the USSR." History now documents the Communist betrayal as far more terrible than Orwell conceived. He became an enemy of Soviet style communism as a consequence of his experiences in Spain, and advocated the English brand of socialism. There is an excellent Introduction in this edition by Lionel Trilling which discusses, to some extent, the political wheeling and dealing that occurred on the Republican side: how the Communist Party allied itself with right wing socialists and liberals to crush the P.O.U.M., with the standard Party line that anyone to the left of them were Trotskyists and therefore "fascist traitors."

This is a masterpiece which brings history to life. For a truly intense portrait of the period, you can do what I did, which was to read Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" with "Homage To Catalonia," back-to-back. My highest recommendations!
JANA

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Homage, Take 2: what about Aragon? , June 20, 2008

By	H. Schneider "Hermit" (window seat) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

After re-reading Catalonia, some 20 years after my first encounter, I am disappointed. I do not think that this is Orwell's best work. It has many of his strengths, mainly the elegant, efficient and straightforward prose that he developed so impressively, but there are some flaws. Main flaw in my view is the fact that the main political theme has become dead and irrelevant. Stalin died some decades ago, the Soviet Empire collapsed, we don't need to dig in the little details of their abominable strategies any longer. Of course we can't blame Orwell for the fact that his concerns are not ours any more. But it shows that the book was not timeless in the sense of surviving its immediate subject, as his other non-fiction did.
Second main weakness of the book: the narration of the Barcelona street fighting and the attempts at understanding them are rather boring.
On the strong side: the tales from the Aragon front are much more interesting. Orwell saw less fighting than he was keen to experience, but he describes the trench routine with the same livelyness that he brought to Wigan coalmines and Paris restaurants previously.
He did see enough fighting to get dangerously injured. People said to him that few men survive a shot through the neck, so he was lucky. He thinks he would have been luckier if he had not been shot at all.
Orwell published the book a few months after his adventure, and before the Spanish Civil War was over. Surprisingly the book was a commercial failure then, and equally surprisingly it has later been named as one of the best non-fiction books of the century.
Why was it ignored in the early time? Possibly because he told the world things that the world didn't want to know. He busted the myth that there was a confrontation of the good and the bad in Spain, that democracy fought fashism. Orwell shows us that there were at least 3 camps, not 2. The most vicious fighting that he experienced was among the 'good guys'. The government side was influenced strongly by the communist party who had secured the support from Russia. Since no other country provided weapons to the government side, that secured a lot of mileage.
Orwell was a hopeless romantic, who loved the feeling of working class rule that he got when he first arrived in Barcelona. That must be the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible book title. That basically socialist attitude must also have put quite a few potential readers off at the time of publication.
Orwell later saw the few months in Spain as his political training period. It put him off communism and Stalin for good, but confirmed his socialist attitude, which however never found a political home in a party, though he did support Labor in his remaining years, from the outside.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seminal Orwell, December 28, 1999

By	M. Friedman (New York Area) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Homage to Catalonia may be the most important book I ever read. Important because it is the book that inspired me to become a journalist, a writer and a teacher.

On the surface, this book is a reportage of the Spanish Civil War. It deals, of course, with the politics, some of the military strategy, and the deep social divisions of the period. More importantly, however, it is the story of how an idealistic, naive, but brilliant man discovered personal truths about war, politics and humanity.

As a history of the Spanish Civil War, it is probably suspect. Orwell was isolated in Catalonia, affiliated with the POUM, a far-left revolutionary Marxist party led by Andres Nin [not Durutti who was, in fact, commander of the Anarchist CNT's militia], and a foreigner. He didn't see enough of the war to write its definitive history.

However, that's not the task Orwell sets for himself. Rather, this is a chronicle of idealistic young men and women in dark times. It is a tale of the promise of revolution and its betrayal by power. Homage to Catalonia is a story of deep humanity about the dignity of man, home, and disillusionment.

It is a great book.