Orwell's Roses - Hardcover

Solnit, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593083369 ISBN 13: 9780593083369

Verlag: Viking, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood

“A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's

“Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.” —Vogue

A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world

“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Recollections of My Nonexistence, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.

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One

Day of the Dead


In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this formore than three decades and never thought enough about whatthat meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was underdoctor’s orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was alsoon a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writerabout a book I’d written. It was November 2, and where I’m fromthat’s celebrated as Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Backhome, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the pastyear, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of andletters to those they’d lost, and in the evening people were going topromenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-airaltars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their facespainted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican traditionthat finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholicplaces, it’s a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adornthem with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, it’s a timewhen the borders between life and death become porous.

But I was on a morning train rolling north from King’s Cross inLondon, gazing out the window as London’s density dissipated intolower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cowsand wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintrywhite sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I waslooking for some trees—perhapsa Cox’s orange pippin apple tree andsome other fruit trees—for Sam Green, who’s a documentary filmmakerand one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking abouttrees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. Weshared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be makinga documentary about them, or we might join forces to make somekind of art about them.

Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after hisyounger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense ofsteadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rollingCalifornia landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees alongwith bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a childare still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I havechanged so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods,the famous redwood forest of old-growthtrees left uncut when therest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needlesthat condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip itonto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopyand not in the open air.

Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annualrings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and thearrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Cartaand sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on thehuge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woodsis 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. Atree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in thethirty-thirdcentury ad, and it would be short-livedcompared to thebristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousandyears. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it theway they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and peoplehave found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, andgardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940and spent the next decade in California. During the Second WorldWar, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote ofthese trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: “Theirsilence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, thanthe reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the burstingof bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias,one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. Irecalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first monthsof the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that hadprobably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing Icould be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”


That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town,we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by MaryEllen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who hadbecome a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist,as well as a player in the elite money politics of San Francisco.She had died more than a hundred years before that day we stood under her eucalyptus trees, which felt as though they were the livingwitnesses of a past otherwise beyond our reach. They had outlivedthe wooden mansion in which some of the dramas of her life hadplayed out. They were so broad they had buckled the sidewalk, andthey reached up higher than most of the buildings around them.Their peeling gray and tan bark spiraled around their trunks, theirsickle-shapedleaves lay scattered on the sidewalk, and the wind murmuredin their crowns. The trees made the past seem within reach ina way nothing else could: here were living things that had beenplanted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees thathad been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we weregone. They changed the shape of time.

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of timelived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about ahundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of timeduring which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum,and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the SpanishCivil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon isgone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longertime scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemeralitythe way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

In Moscow there are trees planted during the Czarist era thatgrew, shed their leaves in fall, stood steadfast through the winters,bloomed in springs through the Russian Revolution, shaded visitorsin summers in the Stalinist era, through the purges, the show trials,the famines, the Cold War and glasnost and the collapse of the SovietUnion, dropped their leaves during the autumns of the rise of thatadmirer of Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and that will outlive Putin andSam and me and everyone on that train with me that November morning. The trees were reminders of both our own ephemeralityand their endurance long beyond ours, and in their uprightness theystood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses.

Also that summer, when we were hanging out at my home talkingabout trees, I had mentioned an essay by George Orwell I had lovedfor a long time, a brief, casual, lyrical piece he dashed off in the springof 1946 for Tribune, the socialist weekly where he published abouteighty pieces from 1943 to 1947. The essay that appeared on April 26,1946, is titled “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” and it’s a triumphof meandering that begins by describing a yew tree in a Berkshirechurchyard said to have been planted by a vicar who was afamously fickle political player, switching sides repeatedly in the religiouswars of the time. That fickleness let him survive and stay inplace, like a tree, while many fell or fled.

Orwell writes of the vicar, “Yet, after this lapse of time, all that isleft of him is a comic song and a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593083369
• ISBN 13: 9780593083369
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland