“Not surprisingly, 1984 has found a nervous readership in today’s ‘post-truth’ era,” Kakutani continued-as if the previous eight years were the truth era. Kakutani compared questionable administration accounts of the size of inaugural crowds to “the Ministry of Truth’s efforts in 1984 at ‘reality control.’” 1984’s Ministry of Truth is actually a department of lies, controlling citizens’ minds and perceptions of reality by publishing false facts as news. Actually, it was the left’s promotion of 1984 that made it a bestseller. Kakutani argued that it was because of the perceived dangers of totalitarianism under a President Trump.
George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, nearly 70 years old, had just hit Amazon’s bestseller list. Who knows? Perhaps we’re already living “1984” without even thinking about it.Just after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times printed a piece titled “Why 1984 Is a 2017 Must Read,” by Michiko Kakutani (Jan. Whether you just want to immerse yourself in a world where everything is turned upside-down and understand or analyze every sort of political nuance the novel is filled with, or you just seem to like the story and wish to know how it might end, Nineteen Eighty-Four is just the right book for you. They believe that the shop, which is located in a proletarian neighbourhood of London, is safe because the room has no telescreen, but they couldn’t be more wrong. They first meet in the country, and eventually in a rented room at the top of an antique shop. Winston and Julia begin an affair after he realizes that she shares his loathing of the Party. Burdened by this thoughts, he starts writing a journal in which he condemns this climate of fear and hopelessness in which he lives, but his life changes radically after meeting Julia, a young woman who maintains the novel-writing machines at the ministry, and discovering that she is in love with him. The plot is based on the understanding concepts of Big Brother, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole, doublethink and Newspeak, all of which depict a highly controlled society, make Winston think that there must be something he needs to do in order to change the oppressed lives of the people living in Oceania. Winston, however, is tired of living in a world where telescreens, microphones and cameras hidden everywhere allow the “Thought Police” to identify anyone who might endanger the Inner Party’s and Big Brother’s regime, which, as the reader discovers since the beginning of the novel, is based on negative nationalism, censorship and, obviously, surveillance. 1984 is the story of a member of the “Outer Party” called Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth as an editor responsible for historical revisionism: he is in fact forced to rewrite and modify every sort of record, proof, photograph or newspaper article with the intention to alter the vision of history itself, making it possible for the leading class, the “Inner Party” to maintain a large political consensus among the people. The novel is set in Airstrip One and most of the action takes place in London, one of the most important cities of Oceania, an intercontinental superstate formed after a world war, which is constantly fighting with the other nations of Eurasia and Eastasia. Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is one of the most known and most insightful works by the English novelist Eric Arthur Blair, known by his famous pen name “George Orwell”.