Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin
Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, is a remarkable book. Larkin is a pseudonym, which you start to understand the necessity for as you read the book. She searches for George Orwell on three levels - first, searching for traces of Eric Arthur Blair, the police officer stationed in Burma before becoming George Orwell, the writer; second, searching for people who have read George Orwell’s works, and finding a virtual literary underground of readers who hide their libraries of western classics from destruction by the natural elements and the ever-present spies; and third, searching for the the truth about how the Myanmar society bears out the dynamics of George Orwell’s book 1984. This kind of look inside of a closed culture is invaluable to understanding the dynamics of the world better, as much as we can ever understand it. I highly recommend it.