1984

Andrò controcorrente ma a me il libro non ha entusiasmato, nonostante la trama che mi incuriosiva e una fama che precedeva il libro,sono rimasto deluso, trama piatta con la conclusione che i regimi totalitari sono il male, ho trovato la storia abbastanza banale, probabilmente se l’avessi letto quando fu pubblicato per la prima volta e quindi avessi vissuto le tensioni politiche europee ma anche italiane di quel periodo lo avrei apprezzato di più.

《一九八四》喬治·歐威爾 20180305

極權下
無自我、無自由、無愛情無親情、無家庭、無情感表露、無歷史、無真相、無生活、無思想、無忠誠、無愛，所有人性的真善美也消失

餘下的只有空白、出賣、木納、行屍走肉般，

但卻要有對領袖的激情，不是很矛盾麼

只有對極權領袖的絕對服從，丁點思想出脫也不行，連發開口夢都要服從，
這還算是人嗎?

連極權自己也承認高壓統治下，為的不是人民更大的好處，只是維持自己的權勢

令人毛骨悚然!

The first time I read 1984 fifty years ago, I was 18 at the time. It had a profound impact on me, but I see now how poorly I understood it. George Orwell’s 1984 features a dystopian future society where free thought is illegal and punishable by “vaporization” which is the act of erasing someone from history. Since the government controls all thought and all information, they can change it as they please, and can therefore change reality as they please. Most of the story is based around this idea that anything perceived as reality, is reality, while also drawing many parallels to Stalin’s tendency to erase people from existence and Karl Marx’s political writings.
1984 is an amazing book. If you enjoy thinking about something for a while and having your mind blown once every few pages, read this book now. It doesn’t start blowing your mind from the beginning, but it still helps you get a grasp of these ideas, and then George Orwell decides “you’ve had enough fun now, how about I explode your brain a few times?” He takes these concepts from a one to a one-hundred in an instant and it just makes the book that much better. Orwell does this in such a fashion that after he breaks your brain, you think about everything that’s happened in the book so far, and you realize what’s been really going on under the surface all this time, and it gives you a greater appreciation for the rest of the book. Orwell’s 1984, which is about a society without free thought, gives us so much to think about, and keeps the reader thinking about it for weeks on end until they start to question their own reality and realize that maybe they’re taking the concept a little too far. In this part of my review, I would like to talk about the ending. I feel that many people didn’t like the ending because they didn’t go on some sort of grand adventure and overthrow the government and go on to live happily ever after. However, I’m happy that the ending didn’t go that way because a happy ending would have ruined the whole point of the book. The whole book is about how hopeless everything is and that everyone’s being brainwashed and there’s no way to escape. If they went on to overthrow the government, then all of that would be pointless, all of the brainwashing and themes throughout the book would become pointless and we would feel empty. We wouldn’t have had any appreciation of the entire rest of the book because it would have simply been overridden. The ending was created perfectly so that instead of nullifying the rest of the book it enforced it and gave us a much greater appreciation of what happened. It also just exploded our concept of all reality and everything we thought we knew about fact and fiction while this one man’s entire past is erased by one relatively quick succession of events. The ending really just drove the book home, and it wouldn’t be the same amazing story without it.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

It was fascinatingly creepy learning bit by bit the world described by Orwell. A sick, degenerated reality that seems just like the perfect setting for a dystopian novel, but that in truth disturbingly has got some common points with the world we live in.
Mental manipulation, centralized power, constant control, suppressed social classes... do they remind you of something?
It was as if Orwell had already foreseen the future, or simply understood the human nature.

Of course it wasn't an easy read nor a light one, because stopping to reflect is simply inevitable and sometimes even confusing, but it's without any doubt a book that everybody should read. It really makes you become more open-minded and critical towards what surrounds you.
Secondly, it was one of the few books I enjoyed even if they were mostly descriptive (particularly in the first part). But it was really intriguing witnessing that distressing society through the eyes of an oblivious rebel, how he came to the point that he saw himself as crazy because he couldn't even discern between his real memories and what the government claimed was The Truth.

The only part I had some struggles with was the one in the middle: it consists in three chapters of the book circulating among the political opponents and is totally theoretical, exactly like a textbook.