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ISBN: 0156196255

ISBN13: 9780156196253

Coming Up for Air

By Denis Johnson

No Customer Reviews

From George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Coming Up for Air is the classic, comic novel about the everyday struggles of the common man and a satiric look at the trappings of middle-class suburbia.George "Tubby" Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman, a job at which he grimly excels, dutifully paying the mortgage on an average English suburban row house, and supporting an ungrateful family. As the years roll by, he comes to feel like a hostage to his wife and children, regarding them as wardens and himself as a prisoner.One day, after winning some money from a bet at the races, George steals away from his family to visit the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF--the perfect ending to his failed escape."A work of rare vigor and imagination."--New York Herald-Tribune Book Review This description may be from another edition of this product.

Format:Paperback

Language:English

ISBN:0156196255

ISBN13:9780156196253

Release Date:October 1969

Publisher:Mariner Books Classics

Length:288 Pages

Weight:0.62 lbs.

Dimensions:8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Related Subjects

Poetry

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Rated 3 stars
Trolling Sinclair Lewis?

By User, August 10, 2022 Verified Purchase

In these reviews someone has compared George Bowling to Winston Smith. I think an even closer comparison would be George Babbitt. The similarities between the two novels is uncanny - the over the hill businessman, ditching the wife for a fishing vacation, the infidelities. Ok novel but pretty much the same book.

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Rated 5 stars
Angst Aspects.

By Thriftbooks.com User, August 3, 2009

This is a book about angst. Societal angst at the ominous clouds of an approaching war and the personal angst of a pointless lifetime slipping away into an irrelevant old age. George Bowling is a moderately successful insurance "tout"... I love the dated English slang in these books..."tout" means salesman. Bowling's thought life is far away from his boring middle class existence in pre-war England. George lives in the...

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Rated 5 stars
Masterpiece

By Thriftbooks.com User, March 5, 2008

A fat middle-aged salesman goes back to his childhood home to fend off a rising anxiety in prewar Europe, and the result is tragicomedy. One of the best novels I have ever read. Orwell was never better at creating a mood, an atmosphere, a state of mind, than in this book. It is engaging, witty, and powerful. I'm not sure I can say exactly what point Orwell (as opposed to the protagonist) was trying to make in this book,...

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Rated 5 stars
The Ultimate Fraud?

By Thriftbooks.com User, December 3, 2001

Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction.This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end.This isn't a comming of age story, its more...

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Rated 5 stars
Orwell's best novel

By Thriftbooks.com User, May 31, 2000

It's a shame that George Orwell's two best-known novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty Four" are neither one his best novel. The peak of Orwell's fiction is this almost forgotten novel, "Coming Up for Air." Set in the last few years before a World War II that was obviously looming on the horizon, this elegant book memorably chronicles the life of George Bowling and his attempt to escape domesticity and the horrors...

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