Homage to Catalonia

I first listened to Homage To Catalonia in 2011 and chose to hear it again now mainly because I needed a 1930s book by the end of August to complete the Decade Challenge! The memoir is very much an account of the limited aspects of the Spanish Civil War that Orwell himself witnessed and, as such, I found I still don't really have much understanding of the many factions involved, the outbreak of acronyms and the full storyline of the conflict. This was a war with numerous armies fighting each other, not a simple 'people against fascism' as it is often portrayed. I was interested to learn that Orwell himself had little idea of the full politics when he first enlisted to fight, a naivete which nearly led to his arrest later on.

Jeremy Northam does an excellent job of the narration and his cultured tones suit the rather formal 1930s English language. Orwell has a minimalist writing style and comes across as an honest and earnest man, but I did often struggle to maintain my interest as parts of the book are quite dry. My having spent part of the last two winters in Catalonia was useful as I could easily envisage the landscapes and towns Orwell describes and I remembered seeing plaques and monuments commemorating some battles and events he mentions. I was saddened to realise that the fascist political ideas discussed in this book are rising again across Europe now, nearly eighty years later. And I saw the same 'Trotskyist' accusation as was leveled at the POUM and Orwell in the 1930s rolled out in a bout of name-calling against Jeremy Corbyn just last week. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose!

Deserves to be up there with Animal Farm and 1984, which seem much more popular in the public mind. The nonfictional context for why the author felt motivated to write those two other books. It seems like there has been a long pro-war vein among conservatives, and plenty of antiwar books on the left; I have read and enjoyed examples from both, but Orwell is one of the people who is both leftwing and happy to endorse violence. Very different feeling in this book than in, for example, many of Kurt Vonnegut's stories. I don't mean to take a position here since I haven't fought in such a war, but it is definitely interesting to see two authors discuss a similar time frame (midcentury antifascist violence) with very different points of view, while still being broadly on the same side of the political spectrum. Favorite anecdote from the book: Orwell visits the Sagrada Familia which he feels is so ugly that he wishes it had been blown up like all the other Spanish churches in areas controlled by the leftist militias. Unfortunately for him, it had been exempted since it was such a fine example of forward looking architecture...

Perhaps I was expecting too much from this book. I had heard high praises of it. Maybe I wanted it to unveil some sort of Anarchist Utopia that secretly thrived in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.
It didn't. Much the opposite perhaps, it reveals the tediousness and futility of war. Orwell's personal (very personal, one might say) account of his participation in the war against Franco's Fascism reads like a personal diary. It's view is limited, personal and or course, biased. He wanted to defeat Fascism and showed up to war. He found the pettiness and poverty of the frontline, the endless waits and the uncomfortable conditions. He does a great job of highlighting how comraderie and spirit were kept in a non-hierarchical army of anarchist or sometimes communist soldiers.
Yet the politics themselves are complicated, the power struggles are intrincate and full of betrayal and lies. The whole fight seems to be a bit futile in the end.
So yeah, I'd reccommend it as a vivid and personal account of living war in the trenches, of trying to stand up for your beliefs and of betrayal and confusion. But I don't think it does much to instill hope of a possible anarchist society, which was perhaps what I was looking for in this book.
Anyway, there is no denying that Orwell is a great writer and his mastery with words shines through even in the most banal of passages and descriptions.

I really enjoyed reading this for several reasons. Firstly, I've read Orwell's fiction, and it's always interesting to read personal accounts of a fiction writer with whom I'm familiar (especially when they recount such a dramatic time period for the writer and the world). Secondly, I am a radical anti-authoritarian who identifies primarily as an anarcho-syndicalist. Orwell's politics are more or less in line with mine, and it was, frankly, thrilling to hear about revolutionary Spain, the abolishment of "usted" and "señor" in favor of "tú" and "comrade"/"comarada", the equalized pay of non-hierarchical anarchist militia columns, etc. It was also infuriating to read about the involvement of Soviet Russia in opportunistically establishing the International Communist Party as the primary non-fascist force which, ironically, suppressed and jailed anarchists and radical socialists after coming to power in the Republican-held strongholds. While Orwell's commentary on the impartiality of the press outside Spain (writing, as they did, from Communist or democratic countries) is very interesting, and makes a great case as to the reasons behind the failure of a radical socialist or anarcho-syndicalist revolution in Spain, it's also thoroughly depressing. I'm not surprised that democratic or Communist forces, being inherently authoritarian, would rather have seen Franco succeed than see people working together in a radically egalitarian society.