Finding George Orwell in Burma
"Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. The connection between George Orwell and Burma is not simply metaphorical, of course; George Orwell's mother was born in Burma, and he was shaped by his experiences there as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. Both his first novel, Burmese Days, and the novel he left unfinished upon his death were set in Burma. And then there is the place of Orwell's work in Burma today: Emma Larkin found it a commonplace observation in Burma that Orwell did not write one book about the country but three - the other two being Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese man if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet."" "Finding George Orwell in Burma is the story of the year Emma Larkin spent traveling across this shuttered police state using the life and work of Orwell as her guide. Traveling from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its network of spies and informers."--Jacket.