synopsis:

set in 1930s london 'keep the aspidistra flying' is about Gordon Comstock, who works as an advertising copywriter, but yearns to be a poet almost as much as he wants to enjoy sex in the afternoons with his patient, steady but sexually uncooperative girl-friend, Rosemary. Despite his boss's assurance that poetry and advertising use the same words but in a different order, Gordon starts his struggle with the 'money-god', hands in his notice and sets out, badly equipped both in financial resources and real-world experience, for the Bohemian life - though he finishes up working resentfully in a bookshop to pay the rent to a series of increasingly eccentric landladies.

While Comstock strives to embrace poverty and his art, Rosemary works furiously to maintain her career and their stormy relationship. Their odd but touching romance revolves around Comstock's desperate attempt to escape middle-class respectability, bizarrely symbolized by the ubiquitous potted houseplant, the aspidistra. The aspidistra he is supposed to keep flying is a small, unprepossessing, green house-plant - perhaps the most boring one that ever grew - and it flourishes only in an atmosphere of the greatest respectability, representing britain's dull middle-class.

Orwell does not sell out Gordon by leaving him set up in a "good" job, living happily in wedded bliss with his beloved Rosemary. Rather, he turns a conventional denouement (marriage and birth) on its ear.

on this book:

Of all his novels, this was Orwell's least favorite. it was criticized by many because of the too-obvious message of 'money is bad'. it is, after orwell's political novels 1984 and animal farm, his best-known novel and expresses main themes of orwell's thinking: his aversion of mediocre middle-class and his ironic and pessimistic view on human beings and society.in 1997 a film based on this novel came out, also known as 'a merry war'.