Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Lesser known than other George Orwell classics like 1984 and Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London was his first published book (1933). 

George Orwell is destitute and living in Paris. He sleeps at a bug-infested inn and pawns his clothes for a meager amount. Starving and alone, he reunites with his friend Boris and, luckily, they get jobs as plongeurs at a filthy Paris restaurant. 

Just when things start looking up for Orwell, he quits his job (because of the twenty hour days without breaks) and moves back to England. There, Orwell is among the poorest of the poor and spends his nights at "spikes", crowded lodging houses where poor men pay a very small amount of money for a rock-hard bed, tea, and bread. In and out of the spikes, Orwell befriends interesting characters and continues to live in poverty.

Orwell likes to rant. This may be the only time I genuinely felt that a writer's rants were important, not annoying. A memorable one was his dedication of a chapter to the evolution of curse words and his feelings about them. This is important because it keeps the history of those words alive; it was also interesting to read about who used the words and how their popularity died out. The frustrating part was that, in the modern American edition I read (Harcourt), three quarters of the curses Orwell used were censored. 

The best part of the story was Orwell's short dictionary of poor men's lingo. This included words like "clodhopper" (street dancer) and "shackles" (soup). By defining the lingo for us, Orwell greatly enhances our feel for the period.

The descriptions of poverty and filth are gut-wrenching. Orwell vividly describes the awful conditions the poor men lived under, the lack of hygiene and sanitation in the spikes and the Paris kitchen, and the feelings of ennui and hunger that he and the other men endured. Orwell never shies away from sharing the details of poverty.

This book has only one major negative: its blatant anti-Semitism. Every description of a Jew is defamatory and offensive. While Orwell's attitudes towards Jews may have changed later, it is still unpleasant to hear him wanting to "flatten the rich Jewish pawn shopkeeper's nose." For me, this lowers the quality of the man, not the work. 

Orwell's overall message is clear: the poor are human beings who should not be seen or treated as swine. This message is still relevant today because, as a society, we often treat the poor and homeless as beneath us. Five out of five stars for Down and Out.