George Orwell, Burmese Days

Lichte slijtage aan de kaft, lichte plekjes aan de rug en de randen van het (zwarte) boek. Met de afbeelding met de boten op de voorzijde

Mooie oudere Penguin paperback editie.

Burmese Days is George Orwell's first novel, although his second to be published in the UK. The book was published in America by Harper and Brothers in October 1934 and not until June 1935, after numerous revisions to the "potentially libelous novel", did Victor Gollancz print 2500 copies of the UK first edition (several months after the publication of A Clergyman's Daughter).

Burmese Days is George Orwell's first novel, although his second to be published in the UK. The book was published in America by Harper and Brothers in October 1934 and not until June 1935, after numerous revisions to the "potentially libelous novel", did Victor Gollancz print 2500 copies of the UK first edition (several months after the publication of A Clergyman's Daughter).

Burmese Days was first published "further afield," in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous; that the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically; and that some of its fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people. After Orwell's agent approached several other publishers, it was released by Harper & Brothers in 1934 in an edition of 2,000 copies. An English edition, with altered names, appeared a year later. Nonetheless, Orwell's harsh portrayal of colonial society was felt by "some old Burma hands" to have "rather let the side down." In a letter from 1946, Orwell wrote, "I dare say it's unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen." In 2013, the Burmese Ministry of Information named the new translation of Burmese Days the winner of the 2012 Burma National Literature Award's "informative literature" (translation) category. The National Literary Awards are the highest literary awards in Burma.

In the Burmese provincial town of Kyauktada, the world-weary John Flory - a thirty-something English teak dealer - leads a life of quiet disillusionment, hardly mixing with the natives or the expat community, and deriving some comfort only from his conversations with an Indian friend, Doctor Veraswami, and the attentions of his local mistress. His prospects seem to improve when he meets the orphaned niece of a timber merchant, Elizabeth Lackersteen, who appears to reciprocate his feelings of love - but the arrival on the scene of another suitor, the boorish police officer Verrall, and the scheming of a disgruntled local magistrate threaten to shatter Flory's dreams and put him on a path to tragedy. Based on the author's own experiences in Burma as a young officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Burmese Days - here presented in the version published in Britain in 1944, which follows the text of its first American edition - is George Orwell's debut novel, invaluable both as a faithful description of life in Burma during the twilight of the British Raj and as an expose of the failings of colonial rule.

Mooie Penguin paperback editie uit 1984.