Sign in with FacebookSandy Tjan's Reviews > Down and Out in Paris and London
Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell
by George Orwell
Sandy Tjan's review
bookshelves: ebook, 2010, general-non-fiction
Jul 01, 10
bookshelves: ebook, 2010, general-non-fiction
Recommended to Sandy by:
Rauf
Recommended for:
Orwell fans, anyone interested in the bumming life
Read from June 29 to 30, 2010, read count: 1
What I learned from this book (in no particular order):
1. There is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris: the waiters are all Italian and German. They just pretend to be French to be able to affect that certain hauteur and charge you exorbitant prices for that mediocre Boeuf Bourgignon.
2. Some of them are spies. Waitering is a common profession for a spy to adopt. It is also a popular profession among AWOL ex-soldiers and wannabe snobs.
3. Real scullery maids do “curse like a scullion” (hey, that’s a Hamlet quotation!). No doubt Shakespeare had watched a real-life Elizabethan scullion at work.
4. Men cooks are preferred to women, not because of any superiority in technique, but for their punctuality in delivering orders. The only woman cook featured in the book has nervous breakdowns at exactly 12 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm every day, although it must be noted that they are caused by circumstances that are beyond her control.
5. A French cook will spit in the soup --- that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
6. A steak will not be handled with a fork: the cook will just pick it up in his fingers and slap it down, run his thumb round the dish and lick it to taste the gravy. He will further press it lovingly with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter.
7. And the waiter, of course, will dip HIS fingers into the gravy --- his nasty, greasy fingers which he is forever running through his briliantined hair.
8. The scullery is the filthiest part of all: it is nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery is rinsing.
9. The Plongeur is the lowest kitchen worker in a French restaurant who deals with the dirtiest, sweatiest work available. However, he is allowed two liters of wine a day, because otherwise, he will steal three. Everyone seems to work faster when partially drunk anyway.
10. A bum’s life, whether in Paris or London, is a real BUMMER.
BUT SERIOUSLY,
George Orwell went slumming in Paris and London, and the result is probably one of the best-written accounts of the bumming life ever penned. However, don’t read it if you are sensitive to pungent, unsparing descriptions of filthy kitchens, foul body odors, bug-infested beds and other unsavory aspects of a life gone to the dogs.
1. There is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris: the waiters are all Italian and German. They just pretend to be French to be able to affect that certain hauteur and charge you exorbitant prices for that mediocre Boeuf Bourgignon.
2. Some of them are spies. Waitering is a common profession for a spy to adopt. It is also a popular profession among AWOL ex-soldiers and wannabe snobs.
3. Real scullery maids do “curse like a scullion” (hey, that’s a Hamlet quotation!). No doubt Shakespeare had watched a real-life Elizabethan scullion at work.
4. Men cooks are preferred to women, not because of any superiority in technique, but for their punctuality in delivering orders. The only woman cook featured in the book has nervous breakdowns at exactly 12 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm every day, although it must be noted that they are caused by circumstances that are beyond her control.
5. A French cook will spit in the soup --- that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
6. A steak will not be handled with a fork: the cook will just pick it up in his fingers and slap it down, run his thumb round the dish and lick it to taste the gravy. He will further press it lovingly with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter.
7. And the waiter, of course, will dip HIS fingers into the gravy --- his nasty, greasy fingers which he is forever running through his briliantined hair.
8. The scullery is the filthiest part of all: it is nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery is rinsing.
9. The Plongeur is the lowest kitchen worker in a French restaurant who deals with the dirtiest, sweatiest work available. However, he is allowed two liters of wine a day, because otherwise, he will steal three. Everyone seems to work faster when partially drunk anyway.
10. A bum’s life, whether in Paris or London, is a real BUMMER.
BUT SERIOUSLY,
George Orwell went slumming in Paris and London, and the result is probably one of the best-written accounts of the bumming life ever penned. However, don’t read it if you are sensitive to pungent, unsparing descriptions of filthy kitchens, foul body odors, bug-infested beds and other unsavory aspects of a life gone to the dogs.
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Reading Progress
| 06/29/2010 | page 70 |
|
33.0% | |
| 06/30/2010 | page 100 |
|
47.0% | "A French cook will spit in the soup -- that is, if he's not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his arrt is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment." |
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Rauf
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rated it 5 stars
Jun 29, 2010 11:33pm
misery has never been documented so well, yeah?
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Rauf wrote: "misery has never been documented so well, yeah?"Yes. And I'm shocked at how filthy those Paris restaurants were. And the drudgery. And the drunkeness/food stealing/ kitchen spats etc. Well, more than eight years later, not much have changed, at least according to Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
I hope they clean up a bit though.
*feeling paranoid about eating in restaurants*
My step-mom has a little plaque in the kitchen that said: Chi veut manger avec plaisir, ne voit pas le cuisinier! (If you want to eat a pleasant meal, don't watch the cook at work!)I worked in a small pension in Italy one summer... you don't want to know what goes on behind the scenes!
ETA: I think I may have to read this one!
Hayes wrote: "My step-mom has a little plaque in the kitchen that said: Chi veut manger avec plaisir, ne voit pas le cuisinier! (If you want to eat a pleasant meal, don't watch the cook at work!)I worked in a ..."
Yes, read it. The writing's great. And the restaurant expose would probably cure you of the habit of eating in restaurants for a while.
Rauf wrote: "Whuh? This review lacks the London part!"I love the Paris part, but not so much the London part. It's not that Orwell wrote it badly, but I guess the life of a Plongeur is inherently more interesting than a tramp's (at least for me). The London part is mostly a review of various charity accommodations plus a bit about the various tramping 'jobs'. Imo, it doesn't have the same verve as the Paris part.
You remember when Orwell wrote about old pensioners who were so poor they had to live in cheap inns, and they only spent their dough on frugal meal and they didn't have anyone else in their lives. To me that was..well, that was just sad.
Rauf wrote: "You remember when Orwell wrote about old pensioners who were so poor they had to live in cheap inns, and they only spent their dough on frugal meal and they didn't have anyone else in their lives. ..."The whole book is sad, though it is laced with (dark) humor. The interesting thing to me is how Orwell analyses the Plongeur's situation, whom he considered to be spending his life in drudgery to provide luxury for the rich. I wonder how Orwell would look at today's massive tourism industry --- would he be against it too?
Darn tootin'. The guy was a socialist. Very political, too. He wrote in an essay:What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
From Why I Write.
I also like the part with the pavement artist in London; forgot his name.
Rauf wrote: "Darn tootin'. The guy was a socialist. Very political, too. He wrote in an essay:What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting p..."
Both Down and Out and Burmese Days could very well became dry, didactic tracts against capitalism and colonialism, but Orwell was so good a writer that they're also powerful works of art.
"I also like the part with the pavement artist in London; forgot his name."
Yes. He's one of the more interesting of the tramps. My favorite character in the whole book is Boris (the ex White Russian captain turned waiter). The tramps, with a few exceptions, are sad, defeated people, but the cooks, waiters, plongeurs etc. are idiosyncratic, at times roguish adventurers.
Next stop: Catalonia?Why I Write ended:
And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
If this was true then I am jerked :D 'Cause I'm pretty sure I was born sans a political purpose.
Rauf wrote: "Next stop: Catalonia?Why I Write ended:
And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple p..."
Hahaha. In a lot of cases, the writer's strong political/ideological purpose often ruins the book as a work of art. I always read a book firstly as a work of art, the ideology/politics is incidental.
And there is nothing wrong with being apolitical, as long as the writing is good. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: There is no such thing as a purposeful or non-purposeful book. Books are well written or badly written.
Oops --- don't think Mr. Orwell would agree with that. ;p
