Andrew

A short little story, but I only read a chapter or two a night (and skipped some nights), so it took a while to get through. This little vampiric story is older than Dracula, and more sexual/erotic in its content (in this way, it has more in common with likely earlier drafts of Stoker's novel, which may exist in various foreign versions of Dracula). Overall, I liked this a lot. It's moody and shocking for its day, and I'm certain any mother or father who read this would have been appalled by it, which is a good mark of horror fiction. The vampire is a predator, obviously, and usually the vampire is coded as a sexual predator (or lover, in certain instances, if not abuser), but the vampire is almost always male. Count Dracula is fearsome because he plays into some Victorian notion of women and young girls falling prey to lecherous but suave men; but here, the main character, a young girl, falls prey to a female vampire, thus turning the whole trope on its head in an unexpected way. As a horror novel making use of mythological motifs in a specific cultural context, Carmilla asks if anyone is safe, since anyone can be a predator; furthermore, is the book about a father's attempt to suppress his daughter's developing homosexuality?

So the book is certainly interesting in those ways. Where I think it fails is in a few plot points that do not make any sense at all. The book leaves some things open-ended, but not in a mysterious way, only a frustrating way. For instance, who was Carmilla's mother? Another pet peeve of mine is the introduction of heroic characters in the last act, who sweep in to solve the narrative problems. Very, very annoying.

This little pamphlet contains three essays and one short story: (1) Why I Write [essay], (2) The Lion and the Unicorn [essay], (3) A Hanging [story], and (4) Politics and the English Language [essay]. The common theme between the pieces is the way language is used to convey political ideas. To quote the final page of the book: “...to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (p120).

Why I Write is largely concerned with Orwell's political motivations: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism [emphasis author's]” (p8). For some (those who have only read Animal Farm or 1984), learning that Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist will raise many questions, but it's simply a misunderstanding: Orwell wanted the state to do it's job by providing a good quality of life to its people, keeping them out from under the boot of the rich, and then to otherwise leave them alone.

The Lion and the Unicorn is the most difficult essay to get through (I, admittedly, DNF'd it) and concerns the political climate of Europe at the time of writing (1941) and the hope that Europe would move away from its totalitarian, capitalistic, unplanned economy, and move toward a more socialistic, planned economy, which sought to better the lives of its citizens rather than investors and businessfolk.

A Hanging is a short story about a group of British officials who oversee the execution of a brown-skinned prisoner (in some British-occupied country), and the way the whole thing is rather annoying and unpleasant to them, not because it is barbarous but old-hat. The story ends with the unnamed narrator asking if such executions are justifiable for any reason.

Politics and the English Language is the real meat of this book though (although considerably shorter than The Lion and the Unicorn), and was the reason I picked up this little volume. Here, Orwell gives his brilliant explanation of why imprecise language is an enemy of commonfolk: “in my opinion” may be more polite than “I think,” but is less precise, and needlessly wordy. In one hilarious stretch, he rewrites a passage from Ecclesiastes in the style of what he considers Modern English Prose.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. (p110)

An absolutely stunning translation filled wall-to-wall with some of the most beautiful English text ever written.

Israel descends deeper into its battle between order and chaos.

Some of these are really beautiful. I wish the Kindle édition better incorporated the endnotes and footnotes, but that's a pretty minor complaint; because of the formatting, I was made to really just focus on the poems themselves, which was nice, although I do wish each poem had a brief introduction from the translator that could help sort out issues of clarity.