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Nov. 6th, 2005 02:56 amIf there is a patron saint of books in Burma, it should be George Orwell, whose first novel, Burmese Days, was drawn from his experiences as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police Force in the mid-1920s. There's a Burmese joke, that Orwell didn't write just one book about the country, but a trilogy, beginning with his first novel, Burmese Days, followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
While you can buy Burmese Days almost anywhere tourist knickknacks are sold, his later novels about totalitarian states are not on display. But, according to Emma Larkin, the pseudonym of a Burmese-speaking American journalist and the author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, they make the rounds anyway. In the course of talking to historians and scholars and book lovers, Larkin found herself presiding over an unofficial Orwell Book Club in the teahouses of Mandalay.
She writes about asking an elderly man about George Orwell. He doesn't seem to know the name. G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l? she asks. Nineteen Eighty-four?
"The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said, `You mean the prophet!'"
Larkin's curiosity was roused when she learned that, on his deathbed in 1950, Orwell sketched an outline for a novella set in Burma. What led him to return there in his imagination, she wondered, and how is it that his novels of soulless autocracies mirror the country that Burma has become in nearly half a century of military dictatorship?
That is all of the Orwell you will find in this article [thestar.com], but you will also find a portrait of the political situation in Burma today. A much more different portrait than what I just heard Michael Palin depict on his BBC show just a few days ago on TVO...
While you can buy Burmese Days almost anywhere tourist knickknacks are sold, his later novels about totalitarian states are not on display. But, according to Emma Larkin, the pseudonym of a Burmese-speaking American journalist and the author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, they make the rounds anyway. In the course of talking to historians and scholars and book lovers, Larkin found herself presiding over an unofficial Orwell Book Club in the teahouses of Mandalay.
She writes about asking an elderly man about George Orwell. He doesn't seem to know the name. G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l? she asks. Nineteen Eighty-four?
"The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said, `You mean the prophet!'"
Larkin's curiosity was roused when she learned that, on his deathbed in 1950, Orwell sketched an outline for a novella set in Burma. What led him to return there in his imagination, she wondered, and how is it that his novels of soulless autocracies mirror the country that Burma has become in nearly half a century of military dictatorship?
That is all of the Orwell you will find in this article [thestar.com], but you will also find a portrait of the political situation in Burma today. A much more different portrait than what I just heard Michael Palin depict on his BBC show just a few days ago on TVO...