![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/2zwmzkbocl625qdrf2qqqfok-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/27199899_web1_211116-SFE-SOLNIT_1-404x505.jpeg\")
By Paul Wilner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Special to The Examiner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone \u2014 well, almost everyone \u2014 knows of George Orwell, whose classic dystopian parable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is regularly summoned upon as commentary on the political climate of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leave it to Rebecca Solnit to cast new light on our understanding of the British author. Solnit\u2019s new book, \u201cOrwell\u2019s Roses,\u201d takes a seemingly quotidian but little-known aspect of his life \u2014 the great pleasure he took in gardening at his country home in Wallington \u2014 as a way of deepening our view of the nature of activism, and of writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Written with her signature combination of deep scholarship, pointed politics and poetically precise prose, the work is arguably her best \u2014 no small achievement from the writer who brought the term \u201cmansplaining\u201d into the modern vocabulary and whose 20 books span everything from memoir to environmental journalism and the arts. She was awarded the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for \u201cRiver of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,\u201d which combined a portrait of photographer\/ inventor Muybridge, with the important changes his work presaged in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cOrwell\u2019s Roses,\u201d she once again helps us see outwardly familiar sights in different, eye-opening ways. With deceptive simplicity she begins: \u201cIn the year 1936 a writer planted roses.\u201d She goes on to trace Orwell\u2019s journey into British coal mines to bear witness to the dangerous conditions there; his decision to join the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War; and his fierce opposition, illustrated in both \u201cNineteen Eighty-Four\u201d and \u201cAnimal Farm,\u201d to shibboleths of the left \u2014 Stalin and Soviet authoritarianism \u2014 as well as the right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While clearly allied with progressive values, Solnit has a bone to pick with the dogmatism that often accompanies the fight for abstract \u201cjustice.\u201d Citing Orwell\u2019s sardonic response to a letter writer who complained that he was \u201ca defender of roses,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy yourself while others are suffering\u2026 It\u2019s a puritanical position, implying that what one has to offer them is one\u2019s own austerity or joylessness rather than some practical contribution toward their liberation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOrwell\u2019s Roses\u201d (Viking) \u2013 San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit\u2019s 20th tome offers fresh insights into the famous British author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By way of illustration, she cites the early 20th-century suffragist cry, \u201cBread for all, and Roses, too,\u201d bringing us back into the present (the Marin County-based rights organization, Bread & Roses, founded in 1974 by singer-activist Mimi Fari\u00f1a is still going strong) and enlarging our understanding of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In doing so, Solnit reclaims Orwell\u2019s legacy from advocates like the late British polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who wrapped themselves in his political mantle without noticing his larger concerns. (Hitchens goes unmentioned in \u201cOrwell\u2019s Roses,\u201d and one doubts the absence is unintentional.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Solnit\u2019s passion for justice burns through as she travels \u2014 audaciously \u2014 to Colombia, to see firsthand the operations of a huge rose factory outside Bogot\u00e1 where employees have the slogan, \u201cThe lovers get the roses, but we workers get the thorns.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The greenhouse sends 6 million roses to the United States for Valentine\u2019s Day and another 6 million for Mother\u2019s Day, but it\u2019s a joyless undertaking for the workers at these \u201cinvisible factories of visual pleasure,\u201d as she describes them. (She recalls Orwell\u2019s observation that his countrymen enjoyed the heat and coal brought to their homes with no thought of the miners breaking their backs to deliver them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the range and force of such far-reaching connections that make Solnit\u2019s work a delight even when her subjects are outwardly grim. The San Francisco-based writer has a deeper, more humanistic perspective than former Californians like Susan Sontag, who seemed more comfortable with theories than people or, for that matter, Joan Didion, known for her acerbic wit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Solnit is an American original; Orwell could not have asked for a more eloquent interlocutor. As she writes: \u201cRereading a significant book is like revisiting an old friend; you find out how you\u2019ve changed when you encounter them again; you see differently because you\u2019re different\u2026 What struck me this time around was how much lushness and beauty and pleasure are in \u201cNineteen Eighty-Four.\u201d They\u2019re endangered, furtive, corrupted, but they exist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A combination of deep scholarship, pointed politics and poetically precise prose By Paul Wilner Special to The Examiner \u2022 November 16, 2021 (SFExaminer.com) By Paul Wilner Special to The Examiner Everyone \u2014 well, almost everyone \u2014 knows of George Orwell, whose classic dystopian parable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is regularly summoned upon as commentary on… Continue reading