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Amazon.com Review
"I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets." Most war correspondents observe wars and then tell stories about the battles, the soldiers and the civilians. George Orwell--novelist, journalist, sometime socialist--actually traded his press pass for a uniform and fought against Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War during 1936 and 1937. He put his politics and his formidable conscience to the toughest tests during those days in the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain. Then, after nearly getting killed, he went back to England and wrote a gripping account of his experiences, as well as a complex analysis of the political machinations that led to the defeat of the socialist Republicans and the victory of the Fascists.

Review
A history, published in Britain shortly after the author wrote it in 1937, of the few months surrounding the Barcelona Telephone Exchange riots and what the writer determines as the Communist betrayal of all of Spain's anti-fascist forces. The crux of Orwell's writing is to show the ridiculous misrepresentations of the actual happenings in Barcelona and on the front and their meaning for the rest of Spain. The Communists were joined with the Government. Another anti-fascist faction was the P.O.U.M. or anarchist militia. They were closely allied with socialist worker movements, ready to build up a workers' revolution. In the beginning when issues were but hazily defined, Orwell joined the P.O.U.M. and fought with them- at the front. The Communists, considering anarchist-socialist revolutionary policies as presumptive, sought successfully to purge the P.O.U.M. and rendered them through messy journalism, coercive police methods, withdrawal of arms, false reports- as Trotskyists, pro-Franco, anything but the potent patriotic force they were. Thus republican Spain lost a power that could have helped beat Franco. Orwell's report is as exciting as it is meditative. With his quiet exactitude the midnight skirmishes, the political issues, and the utter futility of war come clearly into focus. Perhaps not a book to create sensation in a day when much of what happened at Barcelona has been realized, but one enlightening in terms of showing the war way toward mutual understanding and fair play. (Kirkus Reviews)

Autobiographical account by George Orwell of his experience as a volunteer for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, published in 1938. Unlike other foreign intellectual leftists, Orwell and his wife did not join the International Brigade but instead enlisted in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista; POUM). The book chronicles both his observations of the drudgery of the daily life of a soldier and his disillusionment with political infighting and totalitarianism. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

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Customer Reviews

This is classic Orwell
This is a must-read for persons interested in the Spanish Civil War, and it's a side of Orwell that seems to be rarely discussed. Amazingly, Orwell even manages some humor in the midst of this terrible conflict (unlike Hemingway) as Orwell paints the picture of the 1930s Spain that was about to go from a horrific conflict into a horrific dictatorship that is still the dominant topic in Spain more than 30 years after Franco's death (e.g., the formation of the Basque separatist group ETA was greatly helped by hatred for Franco and his desire to crush all non-Castilian culture in Spain).

Orwell the Objective!
My mother spent a frightful childhood in revolutionary Barcelona near the cathedral "Sagrada Famila"...FAI(anarchist)territory. Orwell's account is extremely close to what my mother recounts.

She told me about the compulsory closed fist salute she had to give as a young child in front of the local church (turned FAI party headquarters). The buildings in her neighborhood bedecked with the red and black colors of the anarchists,and her frightened crawling across the kitchen floor as bullets flew between the closely billeted Left militas every night. A horrible period of history...the precursor to WWII.

Orwell did not let ideology hamper his account of the facts. There is more detail than dialectic materialism in "Homage".

The hospital scene is particulary morbid...Orwell survived a shot to the neck in Spain by a Fascist. This section of the book reminds me very much of an essay ("How the Poor Die") he wrote about his brief stay in a french charity hospital during his transient-bum period, circa 1929, detailed in "Down and Out in Paris and London."We can be thankful that we are not under depression era hospital care.

My mother's family were secret members of the Flange who issued false costa rican visas, mostly to clergy who were asked to work in my mother's backyard digging redundant trenches...the condition of ones hands determined the fate of many at the hands of the proletarian police who assessed the class ranking of people by the clues on their hands as they crossed the french border. This fact as many others are alluded to by Orwell...in "Homage."

The family took one of the french refugee ships mentioned in the book just ahead of Communist agents!The hotels mentioned in the book were really controlled by the various militias-the churches were really gutted. Orwell's honesty and decency shines in "Homage to Catalonia".

The real tragedy of the civil war was the defeat of the center...as in Germany, the loonies prevailed.

Orwell was honest and detailed about the spanish dilemma. "Homage" enshrines Orwell as a reliable literary time capsule- a travel journalist...one of his goals stated in his essay "Why I Write". This book is better than many of his novels (pre-1940) which suffer from horrible character development. Job well done!

Orwell re-visited
Homage to Catalonia is Orwell at the zenith of his journalistic style--brutally candid in its description of the battlefield and the politics of the Spanish Civil War in which he participated as a volunteer foot soldier against the military insurgency. The Civil War was, of course, a prelude to WWII and while this is clearly adumbrated in Orwell's vivd descriptions of the antagonists, he could not have anticipated the future conflagration. It is a "must read" not only for those interested in the politics of the conflict but also for anyone desiring a candid insight into the plight of the combatants.