Book review - Burmese Days (George Orwell)

Thought that I'd starting writing about the books I read because there seem to be a lot of days where I'm too busy to find a nice photo; plus, my books are such a big part of my life, so it seems strange to leave them out of my journal!

I just finished re-reading Orwell's Burmese Days, and although it's hard to top 1984 or Animal Farm this is a really great book. Although it's set in such a different time period, I really can connect with being an expatriate in Asia, where the foreign-ness is equally fascinating, exciting and daunting. A lot of experiences Orwell describes are all too familiar - spending evenings down at the British club, unexpectedly coming across performances in the street and constantly dripping with sweat. 

Although the racist relations Orwell creates between the expats and the local community aren't as present anymore, the idea of being "trapped" in a foreign country still lingers amongst the expats I knew in Bangladesh and Indonesia. While there were a few Florys - those who really tried to immerse themselves in the local culture - the vast majority of people I knew spent a lot of their lives inside their homes trying to recreate the lives they lived in their home country.

Burmese Days is a really beautiful love story, not just between two people but between a man and a foreign culture he feels at home in. It feels at first a sharp divergence from Orwell's other fiction, but at its heart it's a fabulous exploration of class, social relations and bureaucracy which makes it all the more enjoyable for me