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1984 Ballet

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about 1984

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BLACK MIRROR Featurette "Nosedive" (HD) Netflix Series

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A fourth season of "Black Mirror" crept onto Netflix in late December and began to squirm through viewers' heads already dizzy with the exhaust fumes of the outgoing year. The six roomy new episodes of Charlie Brooker's anthology series play like a Rod Serling snack pack of dreadful speculation. The season tells tales of love in the age of asexual reproduction, about lives patterned by artificial intelligence, and about consciousness as a carceral state.

From 2011, when the first season of "Black Mirror" aired on Britain's Channel 4, the show has figured media culture as a site of thorough depravity. In the conceptually perfect début, a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is obliged, by kidnappers holding a princess hostage, to fornicate with a pig on film. The man behind the monstrosity turns out to be an artist bent on illustrating the evil of screen-culture circuses. In the following episode, Daniel Kaluuya plays a prole who, like all members of a teeming class that unavoidably consumes omnipresent junk culture, works a daily shift to earn his keep by pedalling a stationary bicycle to generate power. The character spends his nest egg to pay the fee for a pretty girl with a lovely voice to enter a reality show. On air, she is systematically diverted from this "American Idol" fantasy into captivity as a sex-film starlet; he, striving to avenge her subjugation by getting time on the show and speaking truth to power, is likewise led to commercialize his outrage, as if Howard Beale in "Network" signed a long-term contract hosting kitchen-gizmo infomercials. Elsewhere, in a second-season episode titled "White Bear," the narrative line emerges from a blur of cleverly withheld context, and we see that we have watched the torture of a woman who, convicted as an accomplice to a gruesome murder, spends her days in a state of forced amnesia, running for her life from armed assailants while unaware that the hunt is a popular spectator sport.

Throughout, "Black Mirror" sizzles with skillful unpleasantness, conveying its dim view of human nature in a way that implicates the viewer. On the one hand, the show indicts the daily dissipation of our real world. On the other, it is not above catering to our dissipated tastes by administering bumps of the old ultraviolence. With the new season, the spectacle of sadism has seeped into the background, where it emits noxious compounds essential to the atmosphere. Witness, if you will, the season-opening episode titled "U.S.S. Callister." Here, an affluent tech schlub scavenges the DNA of his co-founder and their employees to create digital clones who exist in a personalized private-server edition of the company's successful online game. The spaceship of the episode's title is an alternative-universe model of "Star Trek" 's Enterprise. The antihero at his helm behaves like a Captain Kirk who has degenerated into Colonel Kurtz: playing a boy's game of beaming down to distant planets to defeat pulp villains, he behaves with the cruelty of a slave master, inherently, as each clone possesses a self-awareness tantamount to having a soul. The power trip is intrinsic to his pleasure; the episode suggests the universal show-biz complicity in romancing myths of domination, galactic and otherwise.

The series, with its insistent eye for sinister impulses, can be too much to take. This is partly a credit to its psychological acuity, partly a consequence of its tonal intensity when unspooling morality plays. Though "Black Mirror" covers all the capital vices, there is no God in its moral universe, just human souls with their bare hands tapping at smooth machines and hearts lusting for the blood of seeming justice. Its strongest ideas and images are so on the nose that they might as well be your glasses. When a storyteller imagines, as series creator Charlie Brooker did in 2013, an insolent computer-animated bear from a TV show running for Parliament and ultimately emerging as the face of an authoritarian state, he is not so much spinning a yarn as spreading the news.

Dozens of times, when watching a violent film, I have covered my eyes with my hands. However, I had never physically turned my back on a television set until I withdrew from the sixth episode of the new season, titled "Black Museum." The episode presents, among its cabinet of curiosities, a sci-fi fable about an E.R. doctor. A Cronenbergian implant-a sort of empathetic mind-meld gizmo-enables the doctor to feel his patients' pain in his own nervous system. Experiencing death, he returns to the mortal plane addicted to agony. It was not the gore of the story-of the doctor, cut off from his supply of other people's suffering, entering a self-mutilation phase-that revolted me, though there was that. What made the scene unwatchable is the same element that inspires me to recommend it: the way the gore laced with the nausea (inspired by the fiendishness of the dramatic device of the implant) probed pain and destruction so exactly as to feel invasive. My turn away from the show maybe shares its posture with an unease some viewers feel for the new season. When the moral arguments of "Black Mirror" grow strident, and overbearing klaxons ring about corporate surveillance states, an episode can weigh like a ponderous cyberpunk parable, and the effect is off-putting. Still, the series's lively futurist premises and tight production design combine to supply shocks of recognition. Suspense stories about violated memories and surveilled minds transmit the queasiness of everyday alienations.

We live in the best of all possible worlds for dystopian fantasies to flourish. "Radical pessimism is a dismal trend," Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine last June while surveying the golden age of dystopian fiction. Adaptations of novels by Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood will continue to flow on small screens. Ads touting new paranoid thrillers will continue to aim at consumers across all their media devices, according to algorithmic decree. And, because this virtual weather won't let up anytime soon, I'd like to propose classing the precise dystopia of "Black Mirror" as a cacotopia, by way of putting a name to the sensation it delivers.

Cacotopia is a synonym for dystopia coined, in the eighteenth century, from the Greek kakós, meaning "bad." It shares that root with kakistocracy, a word that denotes government by the worst persons, and which therefore has gained unprecedented prominence in the past year. Anthony Burgess, discussing "Nineteen Eighty-Four," favored the term on account of its gagging acrid sound: "I prefer to call Orwell's imaginary society a cacotopia-on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse." Some academics differentiate between dystopian fictions as those that primarily contend with political oppression and cacotopian ones as those that foreground moral decline, and the distinction has its uses.

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With "Black Mirror," Our Dystopia Gets the Television Show It Deserves

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Throughout, the series sizzles with skillful unpleasantness, conveying its dim view of human nature in a way that implicates the viewer.

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Melodramatic types that they are, musicians love a bit of doom and gloom set in far-flung futures where society's crumbled and sits on the brink of collapse. From the Rolling Stones and Kate Bush to St Vincent and Rage Against The Machine, loads of acts have ended up with killer songs after imagining the end is nigh. Here are 40 tracks that picture the end of the world as we know it...

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40 Bone-Chilling Tracks That Predict A Dark Dystopian Future - NME

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Melodramatic types that they are, musicians love a bit of doom and gloom set in far-flung futures where society's crumbled and sits on the brink of collapse. From the Rolling Stones and Kate Bush to St Vincent and Rage Against The Machine, loads of acts have ended up with killer songs after imagining the end ...

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La grande librairie Rencontre avec Margaret Atwood

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Son roman est l'un des plus attendus de l'automne. Entretien exceptionnel avec Magaret Atwood, l'auteure canadienne, mondialement connue pour avoir écrit "La servante écarlate", revient sur l'univers et la genèse de sa terrible dystopie d'une Amérique cauchemardesque devenue une théocratie, adaptée pour la télévision dans la série "The Handmaid's Tale" avec Elisabeth Moss.

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Interview of Margaret Atwood and actress Elizabeth Moss

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Interview of Margaret Atwood and actress Elizabeth Moss

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In dystopian 'Handmaid's Tale,' a warning for a new generation not to take rights for granted

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LE BON CHOIX

Ce jeudi 10 octobre sort le très attendu roman Les Testaments, écrit par Margaret Atwood et faisant suite à la dystopie La Servante Écarlate. L'autrice Canadienne est loin d'être la seule à utiliser ce genre pour dénoncer les inégalités hommes/femmes.

LECTURE - Comment mieux sensibiliser sur les questions d'égalité entre les hommes et les femmes, et faire prendre conscience des discriminations liées au genre? La dystopie semble être un style tout trouvé, investi par de nombreux auteurs et autrices, avec comme figure de proue la Canadienne Margaret Atwood.

Son roman le plus célèbre, laServante Écarlate, sorti en 1985 et adapté depuis en série pour Hulu, s'offre une suite attendue depuis des années:Les Testaments, dont la version française est publiée ce jeudi 10 octobre.

Deux romans qui plongent ses lecteurs dans un monde où le patriarcat a pris tous les droits sur le corps des femmes. Le viol ritualisé des Servantes Écarlates, les seules femmes fertiles de la société, est aidé par la complicité des Épouses, tandis que les Martha ne sont là que pour servir les familles les plus aisées.

Une fiction glaçante? Pour Margaret Atwood, ce n'est qu'une réalité appliquée au monde occidental, mais rien n'est inventé. Les sévices qu'elle décrit ne sont que des retranscriptions des traitements qui sont ou ont été réservés aux femmes dans le monde.

Ainsi, l'autrice réussit à dénoncer des inégalités systémiques contemporaines en prenant l'excuse de la fiction futuriste: un moyen bien souvent utilisé par les écrivains lorsqu'il s'agit de dénoncer ou d'alerter sur le recul de droits fondamentaux.

En voici plusieurs à dévorer, avec les bons conseils de Mélina Oligo, libraire, féministe et créatrice de la Glory Book Box; ainsi que de Camille et Louise fondatrices du podcast et club de lecture féministe The Feminist Book Club (Paris). Avec elles, nous revenons sur les raisons du succès de la dystopie féministe, et ses limites.

Des romans pour continuer sur la lancée de Margaret Atwood

Les heures rouges, de Leni Zumas

Un roman là encore considéré comme un classique du genre, mais qui se doit d'être observé à travers nos lunettes contemporaines, prévient Camille Lingre du podcast Feminist Book Club. Ce roman qui conte l'arrivée de trois hommes explorateurs dans une communauté d'Amazonie exclusivement féminine était autrefois vu comme une utopie. "Aujourd'hui, on se rend compte de la binarité de la représentation du roman, analyse Camille, et des stéréotypes qu'il utilise, discriminant et prônant le collectif. Utopie hier, c'est aujourd'hui une vraie dystopie".

Il reste primordial à lire pour démonter les clichés qu'il véhicule notamment sur le matriarcat et le corps des femmes, estime la journaliste.

Le résumé de l'éditeur: Trois Américains, intrigués par des légendes locales, découvrent sur une haute montagne un pays grand comme la Hollande. Devenus les premiers mâles à visiter Herland en près de deux mille ans, ils y découvriront, à leur grand étonnement, une société entièrement féminine. Herland est l'une des utopies féministes les plus réussies qui furent jamais écrites. Paru en 1915 sous forme de feuilleton dans le magazine de Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Forerunner, qu'elle rédigeait en totalité, y compris les annonces publicitaires, ce roman rencontra un grand succès en son temps avant d'être oublié pendant plusieurs dizaines d'années. Redécouvert par la nouvelle génération féministe des années 1960, Herland paraît pour la première fois en poche.

Sang-de-lune de Charlotte Bousquet

Les fans de La Servante Écarlate vont s'y retrouver: cette dystopie "intelligente et féministe" met là aussi les femmes au ban de la société, décrit Mélina Oligo. Elles n'ont droit plus qu'à 100 mots par jour, punies par un bracelet envoyant une décharge en cas de zèle. "Toujours efficace et effrayant dans son déroulé et sa narration à la première personne", analyse la créatrice de Glory book Box bien qu'elle déplore la fin "trop vite expédiée et pleine de clichés", elle reste satisfaite de cette "bonne lecture".

Le résumé de l'éditeur: Jean McClellan est docteure en neurosciences. Elle a passé sa vie dans un laboratoire de recherches, loin des mouvements protestataires qui ont enflammé son pays. Mais, désormais, même si elle le voulait, impossible de s'exprimer : comme toutes les femmes, elle est condamnée à un silence forcé, limitée à un quota de 100 mots par jour. En effet, le nouveau gouvernement en place, constitué d'un groupe fondamentaliste, a décidé d'abattre la figure de la femme moderne. Pourtant, quand le frère du Président fait une attaque, Jean est appelée à la rescousse. La récompense ? La possibilité de s'affranchir - et sa fille avec elle - de son quota de mots. Mais ce qu'elle va découvrir alors qu'elle recouvre la parole pourrait bien la laisser définitivement sans voix...

Ma soeur, serial killeuse, de Oyinkan Braithwaite

Un ouvrage qui a pour avantage de faire sortir la dystopie féministe de son hégémonie: contrairement aux ouvrages présentés précédemment, ce roman de la nigériane Oyinkan Braithwaite met en scène des femmes en dehors de la société occidentale. "On est en pleine dystopie, car pour une fois, le serial killeur n'est pas un homme, et c'est un excellent moyen de dénoncer les procédés sexistes de la société nigériane, en questionnant là encore les dérives d'un système matriarcal", nous détaille Camille Lingre.

Le résumé de l'éditeur: Korede s'est donné pour mission de protéger sa cadette envers et contre tout, et ce n'est pas une mince affaire. Non contente d'être la plus belle et la favorite de leur mère, Ayoola a aussi la fâcheuse habitude de tuer ses amants. Ainsi, au fil du temps, Korede est devenue experte pour faire disparaître les traces de sang et les cadavres. " Seulement, avec Femi, ça fait trois. Et à trois, on vous catalogue serial killer... ". Korede a une vie à mener, elle aussi : elle est secrètement amoureuse de Tade, le séduisant médecin qu'elle croise tous les jours dans les couloirs de l'hôpital où elle travaille comme infirmière. Aussi, lorsque sa jeune soeur jette son dévolu sur Tade, Korede se trouve face à un dilemme : comment continuer à protéger Ayoola, sans risquer la vie de l'homme qu'elle aime ? À l'instar d'une Jane Austen des temps modernes, Oyinkan Braithwaite interroge les liens du sang, tout en pratiquant une critique en règle de la société nigériane: sa corruption, ses différences de classe, son machisme exacerbé... Une comédie noire et décalée, aussi grinçante que glaçante

La dystopie, le genre glaçant privilégié des féministes

Mais pourquoi la dystopie est à ce point privilégiée par les autrices féministes?

Pour Mélina Oligo, libraire et militante féministe qui a lancé l'abonnement Glory Book Box [une box littéraire sur abonnement qui propose tous les mois deux à trois livres écrits par des femmes], c'est un excellent moyen de faire se questionner le lecteur, qui se projette nécessairement dans ce sombre futur.

"La dystopie résonne comme une alerte sur le monde dans lequel nous vivons et celui dans lequel nous pourrions vivre [...] elle permet aussi de se faire peur dans le confort de son propre espace", analyse-t-elle. Des histoires qui permettent de se dire "et si?", tout en se questionnant sur le présent et occasionner une prise de conscience. Pour la féministe, c'est une très bonne chose d'en voir autant en librairies: "le jour où il n'y en aura plus, c'est là qu'il faudra vraiment s"inquiéter!", avance-t-elle.

Camille et Louise, du podcast Feminist Book Club arrivent peu ou prou aux mêmes conclusions. "Les romans dystopiques mettent en garde en pointant du doigt nos dérives, tout en assouvissant nos envies de fantaisies réalistes. Ce sont souvent des lectures plaisantes, mais qui restent politiques: plus accessibles qu'un essai, et parfois tout aussi percutant", analyse pour Le HuffPost Camille Lingre.

Attention toutefois aux limites du genre prévient la journaliste: "c'est souvent un monde très binaire qui est décrit dans les dystopies féministes", avance-t-elle. "Ce sont les hommes contre les femmes, tandis que le reste des luttes est oublié: les question raciales, de genre, ou de de classes sont trop souvent évincés". Le développement que connaît ce genre ces dernières années promet toutefois d'explorer ces thématiques.

Certains liens de cet article renvoient vers des sites marchands, Le HuffPost peut recevoir une rémunération si un lecteur achète le produit en ligne. Tous les articles publiés sur Le HuffPost sont choisis et écrits en totale indépendance. Les experts interrogés sont également indépendants des marques ou produits qu'ils citent. En savoir plus

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Comme "Les Testaments", voici 8 romans utilisant la dystopie féminine

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Ce jeudi 10 octobre sort le très attendu roman Les Testaments, écrit par Margaret Atwood et faisant suite à la dystopie La Servante Écarlate. L'autrice Canadienne est loin d'être la seule à utiliser ce genre pour dénoncer les inégalités hommes/femmes.

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE Bande Annonce (2017) La Servante Écarlate, Série

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Regardez la bande annonce du film Hunger Games (Hunger Games Bande-annonce VO). Hunger Games, un film de Gary Ross

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Dystopic | Dystopian book and film reviews

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The second book in the 4 books in 4 weeks challenge is The Giver, the perfect example of how poignant and compelling a YA novel can and should be.

This anti-utopian novel is set in a society in which 'sameness' has been instilled in every aspect of the inhabitants' lives. There has been a suppression of extreme emotions, memory, choice and natural instincts, and even the temperature and surrounding landscape is flat and even. The population size is strictly controlled and everyone is assigned to his or her life-long occupation at the age of twelve. The extreme oppression is hidden under the pretence of welfare and care and as a result there is an air of calm and contentedness despite the obvious lack of freedom.

Jonas is about to turn twelve. He is a sweet natured and intelligent boy who isn't sure what job he wants to be assigned to but has complete faith that he will be happy in whatever is chosen for him. On the day of the Ceremony of Twelve he gathers with his peers to discover what his future entails, but he isn't given a job as a carer or a teacher like the others - he is chosen to be the new Giver.

The Giver is separated from the rest of society. He is permitted to have memories, educate himself and fuel himself with as much knowledge as possible so that he can guide the community with his alternative view of the world, but how will Jonas cope with the burden and loneliness that comes with being a Giver? And how will it change the way he views the Elders who control the community, his childhood, his friends and his family?

To me this novel contains everything I adore about the dystopian genre: intrigue, secrecy, oppression, subtlety, heart and complex characterisation. As expected for a YA book The Giver isn't a difficult read but it is challenging and confrontational in the most intricate and powerful of ways.

In this short novel Lowry perfectly illustrates that pain is an essential element of life, as is love and uncertainty and selflessness, but she does so without the concept becoming corny or cliché. The necessity of experience, change and simply living is depicted beautifully in the novel and she stresses the importance of embracing it to the demographic that needs this message the most: teenagers.

The Giver successfully dabbles with both plausible and implausible concepts, unlike most other examples of dystopian literature. Many elements of the novel are fantastical but the reaction to them is not; when successful long-lasting oppression is achieved (which is almost impossible to organise in reality) the oppressed believe they are happy and looked after and have no cause to revolt. I found the acknowledgement of this refreshing and fascinating to read, so much more so than the scores of actively rebellious teens seen in The Hunger Games. It is far more difficult to rebel against society than is usually depicted in dystopian YA fiction.

This is a disturbing but essential book for teenagers - hell, it's incredibly important for adults to read too. Somehow Lowry has managed to portray what true oppression looks like while highlighting both the negative and positive aspects of living in a free and democratic society. If you want to feel both devastated and liberated at the same time (and if you're visiting a blog about dystopian literature you probably do) then The Giver needs to go on your 'to read' list.

This review is also part of my 2017 Reading Challenge.
http://www.dystopic.co.uk

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The second book in the 4 books in 4 weeks challenge is The Giver, the perfect example of how poignant and compelling a YA novel can and should be. This anti-utopian novel is set in a society in which 'sameness' has been instilled in every aspect of the inhabitants' lives.

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n a recent essay published in these pages, Jonathan Franzen inveighed against what he sees as the glibness and superficiality of the new online culture. "With technoconsumerism," he wrote, "a humanist rhetoric of 'empowerment' and 'creativity' and 'freedom' and 'connection' and 'democracy' abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it's far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people's worst impulses, than newspapers ever were."

I cite this because it chimes with the points that Dave Eggers is making in his latest novel, The Circle; we are at an interesting moment when two such significant figures of American letters have both independently been so moved to expound on the same subject. But my guess is that Eggers won't suffer the same online crucifixion that has subsequently been Franzen's fate. Why? Because although Eggers is saying all the same things as Franzen (and so much more), he makes his case not through the often tetchy medium of the essay, but in the glorious, ever resilient and ever engaging form of the novel.

The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication. That is not to say the writing is without formal weaknesses - Eggers misses notes like an enthusiastic jazz pianist, whereas Franzen is all conservatoire meticulousness - but rather to suggest that The Circle is a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age.

This is the story of Mae Holland, a woman in her early 20s, who secures a job at the vast techno-sexy social media company, the Circle, an approximate combination of Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal and every other big online conglomerate to whom we have so far trusted our lives. Run by the "Three Wise Men", the Circle recruits "hundreds of gifted young minds" every week and has been voted "most admired company four years running". Among their inventions is "TruYou", a single integrated user interface that executes and streamlines every internet interaction and purchase: "One button for the rest of your life online." Their philosophy is total transparency and their campus is an architectural essay in glass, a temple to all the geek-chic entertainment and amenities that limitless profits can buy.

Mae is absurdly grateful for the opportunity to work in this brave new world. The novel tracks her own integration into the ethos and activities of the Circle, gradually illuminating a deeply disconcerting vision of how real life might soon be chased into hiding by the tyranny of total techno-intrusion. Mae, herself, ends up suggesting that an account with The Circle should be made mandatory by the government, this being the most effective way to increase vote turnouts.

There is much to admire. The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now. "SeeChange" is one such: millions of cheap, lollipop-sized "everything-proof" high-resolution cameras with a two-year battery life that can be taped up anywhere so that the video streams can be accessed by all. "This is the ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always." Meanwhile, there are some fine moments of description - Eggers portrays the mysterious Kalden as a man whose "skinny jeans and tight long-sleeve jersey gave his silhouette the quick thick-thin brushstrokes of calligraphy".

The book is also very funny. Dan, Mae's boss, is described as "unshakeably sincere"; he nods "emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered something his ears found quite profound". One of my favourite passages describes Mae's frenzy as she attempts to raise her "PartiRank", her relative Circle social-participation score, calculated as the result of her digital interactions. After work, therefore, she sits for hours in front of her myriad screens and posts in 11 discussion groups, joins 67 more feeds, replies to 70 messages, RSVPs to dozens of events, signs petitions and provides widespread "constructive criticism" before realising that, in order to make real headway up the ranks, she had better stay up all night and manically comment, smile, zing, join, frown, befriend, invite ...

Mae has a boyfriend from her past, Mercer, her main antagonist. Mercer spends hours thinking of ways to "unsubscribe to mailing lists without hurting anyone's feelings". He finds that the digital bingeing of the world leaves him "hollow and diminished", and that there is "this new neediness [that] pervades everything". Indeed, it is Mercer with whom Franzen might best get along; Mercer feels that he has "entered ... some mirror world where the dorkiest shit is completely dominant", that "the world has dorkified itself". And it is Mercer's fate - when Mae tracks him down in hiding using Circle technology - that furnishes the novel with its most kinetic passage of satire.

There are a few weaknesses. Eggers struggles here and there to balance psychological plausibility with the outlandishness of his satirical flourishes; he sometimes needs his characters to behave in ways that seem - certainly when you put the book down - to be wholly implausible. There is also a clumsy metaphorical scene where a shark eats all the other fish in the aquarium tank. But this is a prescient, important and enjoyable book, and what I love most about The Circle is that it is telling us so much about the impact of the computer age on human beings in the only form that can do so with the requisite wit, interiority and profundity: the novel.

Edward Docx's The Devil's Garden is published by Picador.

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n a recent essay published in these pages, Jonathan Franzen inveighed against what he sees as the glibness and superficiality of the new online culture.

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Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro
263pp, Faber, £16.99

The children of Hailsham House are afraid of the woods. In the days when their guardians were much stricter, the school myth goes, a boy's body was found there with its hands and feet removed. Sometimes that dark, threatening fringe of trees can cast such a shadow over the whole school that a pupil who has offended the others might be hauled out of bed in the middle of the night, forced to a window, and made to stare out at it.

When not applying peer pressure in this curious way, Hailsham children seem to have a nice life. The school places considerable emphasis on self-expression through art and, especially, on staying healthy. There are frequent, exhaustive medical check-ups. Smoking is a real crime, because of the way it can damage your body. Yet despite the care lavished on them, their world has a puzzlingly second-hand feel. Everything they own is junk. Teaching aids are rudimentary. Sometimes you get the feeling they're being taken care of on the cheap.

In fact, they are; and their fear of the woods reflects, in a distorted but fundamentally accurate way, their fate. They're organ donors, cloned to be broken up piecemeal for spares. The purpose of Hailsham is to prepare them for their future - to help instal the powerful mechanisms of self-repression and denial that will keep them steady and dependable from one donation to the next.

Never Let Me Go is the story of Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, and of the love-triangle they begin at Hailsham. Ruth is the controlling one, Tommy is the one who used to find it hard to keep his temper: they hope that love will save them. They've heard that love - or art, or both - will get you a deferral. Kathy - well, Kathy is a carer by nature as well as profession: she watches her friends break themselves against the inevitable, but never lets them go. After Hailsham, they grow from puzzled children to confused young adults. They live in a prolonged limbo, waiting for the call to donate. They're free to wander. They write essays, continue with their artwork, learn to drive, roam Britain looking for their "possibles" - the real human beings they might have been cloned from.

Their lack of understanding of the world is funny and touching. They stare into the window of an ordinary office, fascinated by the clean modern space. "It's their lunch break," Tommy says reverently of the office workers, "but they don't go out. Don't blame them either." The clones look in at the society that made them, failing to understand its simplest social and economic structures.

As readers we're in a similar position. What Kathy doesn't know, we have to guess at. This sometimes excruciating curiosity propels us along; meanwhile, Ishiguro's careful, understated narration focuses on the way young people make a life out of whatever is on offer. Nothing is more heartbreaking than received wisdom, and Hailsham students, carefully sheltered not just from any real understanding of their fate but from any real understanding of the world in which it will be acted out, have nothing else to go on.

Their sense of suspension, in a present where they neither make nor understand the rules, is pervasive. Childishly snobbish about the proprieties, they're as puzzled by what's proper as anyone else. Small fashions of behaviour come and go. Far into adulthood Kathy, Tommy and Ruth dissimulate and bicker and set teenage behavioural traps for one another.

Inevitably, it being set in an alternate Britain, in an alternate 1990s, this novel will be described as science fiction. But there's no science here. How are the clones kept alive once they've begun "donating"? Who can afford this kind of medicine, in a society the author depicts as no richer, indeed perhaps less rich, than ours?

Ishiguro's refusal to consider questions such as these forces his story into a pure rhetorical space. You read by pawing constantly at the text, turning it over in your hands, looking for some vital seam or row of rivets. Precisely how naturalistic is it supposed to be? Precisely how parabolic? Receiving no answer, you're thrown back on the obvious explanation: the novel is about its own moral position on cloning. But that position has been visited before (one thinks immediately of Michael Marshall Smith's savage 1996 offering, Spares). There's nothing new here; there's nothing all that startling; and there certainly isn't anything to argue with. Who on earth could be "for" the exploitation of human beings in this way?

Ishiguro's contribution to the cloning debate turns out to be sleight of hand, eye candy, cover for his pathological need to be subtle. So what is Never Let Me Go really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan.

By the final, grotesque revelation of what really lies ahead for Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, readers may find themselves full of an energy they don't understand and aren't quite sure how to deploy. Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters.

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

· M John Harrison's latest novel is Light (Gollancz)

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Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro263pp, Faber, £16.99 The children of Hailsham House are afraid of the woods. In the days when their guardians were much stricter, the school myth goes, a boy's body was found there with its hands and feet removed.

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Regardez la bande annonce du film Never Let Me Go (Never Let Me Go Bande-annonce VO). Never Let Me Go, un film de Mark Romanek

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Her Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson Movie HD

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The Giver TRAILER 2 (2014) - Brenton Thwaites, Katie Holmes Movie HD

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Map of Gilead, as it may be supposed from the novel

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Map of Gilead, as it may be supposed from the novel

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See also: Gilead (Category) See also: Geography of Gilead .

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Atwood announces sequel!

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Margaret Atwood has announced a sequel to her bestselling feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, titled The Testaments. It will be published in September 2019.

"Dear Readers," wrote Atwood in a press release announcing the book on Wednesday. "Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in."

The Handmaid's Tale follows one woman's struggle to survive in a dystopian future America, renamed Gilead, where women possess few rights, are used as breeding vessels and are not allowed to read or write. The novel was first published in 1985, and quickly recognised as a modern classic.

It has sold more than eight million copies in English and has gained a new readership in recent years, because of its perceived relevance amid global discussions of sexual harassment, abortion rights and the rise of populist politicians such as Donald Trump. The critical success of the 2017 television adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss in the lead role of Offred has also helped extend the book's audience.

The Testaments will be set 15 years after Offred's final scene in The Handmaid's Tale and narrated by three female characters. It will not be connected to the television version, which has extended beyond Atwood's 1985 novel to continue Offred's story.

The novel ends enigmatically, with Offred being placed in a van that will possibly deliver her to freedom outside Gilead. An epilogue is narrated by an professor delivering a lecture about the authenticity of Offred's story in the year 2195, based on cassette tapes he discovered in Maine.

"As a society, we've never needed Margaret Atwood more," said Becky Hardie, deputy publishing director at Chatto & Windus. "The moment the van door slams on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most brilliantly ambiguous endings in literature. I cannot wait to find out what's been going on in Atwood's Gilead - and what that might tell us about our own times."

Demonstrators dressed as handmaidens awaiting the arrival of Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation hearing for the US supreme court in September. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

After the success of the television adaptation, the distinctive red robe and white bonnet of the handmaidens began to be adopted as a symbol of female oppression. with silent protesters donning the costume at pro-choice rallies in Argentina and Ireland, and at the September hearings for US supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh, after he was accused of sexual assault. In 2017, Atwood's novel spent 16 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list, while UK publisher Vintage reported a 670% year-on-year increase in sales.

Atwood has previously teased a sequel, most recently in an audiobook adaptation for Audible. At the end of the epilogue, she added a Q&A session that ended with the lecturer saying: "I hope to be able to present the results of our further Gileadian investigations to you at some future date."

"I am in consultation with the professor, but he is being very cagey about this," Atwood told Canadian website the Loop at the time. "He evidently doesn't want to make any promises before he has finished authenticating his new discoveries."

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Margaret Atwood announces The Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments

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Margaret Atwood has announced a sequel to her bestselling feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, titled The Testaments. It will be published in September 2019. "Dear Readers," wrote Atwood in a press release announcing the book on Wednesday. "Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book.

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The George Orwell dystopian novel is a best seller because so much of what it describes can be seen in the early statements and actions of the Trump administration.

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 Why The Handmaids Tale is so relevant today 

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 Why The Handmaids Tale is so relevant today 

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A white, wide-brimmed bonnet and a red cloak have come to mean one thing: women's oppression. Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale seared this image into our souls with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery to bear the children of the elite - and wear this uniform to underline their subservience. For more than three decades, the image has shown up on the covers of the book around the world, on posters from the 1990 film, in ads for the 2017 TV series, and even on real women at demonstrations for reproductive rights.

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The handmaid we're presumably seeing in most of these images, though we often don't know for sure, is Offred, the tale's narrator. As a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, she must routinely submit to ritualistic sex with her commander, Fred. (Her name derives from the term "of Fred.") She's one of the still-fertile women rounded up for the job of reproduction after many women in the ruling class were rendered infertile by environmental toxins. Before a coup toppled the US government to form the new theocratic state Gilead, she was married to a man named Luke and had a young daughter.

Atwood conceived the novel as 'speculative fiction,' a work that imagines a future that could conceivably happen without any advances in technology from the present. In other words, she said, "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." Every aspect of the book was inspired by social and political events of the early 1980s, when she wrote it.

Because of this, Atwood's novel has an eerie way of always feeling of the moment, as it turns out, from its first publication through every other iteration that has followed. When it debuted in 1985, Atwood even took newspaper clips to her interviews about the book to show her plot points' real-life antecedents. The book mirrored the United States' embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, as well as the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition - not to mention the rise of televangelism. The character of Serena Joy in The Handmaid's Tale is a former televangelist who articulates theocratic policy suggestions that have now forced her, like all women, into a life solely at home: Atwood writes of Serena Joy, "She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."

Though Atwood is Canadian and writing about a later time - Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, speculated the book was set around 2005 - she has said the commentary was aimed squarely at the United States of the 1980s, including the rising political power of Christian fundamentalists, environmental concerns, and attacks on women's reproductive rights. The backlash against abortion in the US at the time included a widely distributed propaganda video called 'The Silent Scream,' a rash of abortion clinic bombings and arson cases and a proposed law that would give foetuses civil rights protections. The Reagan administration also broke with longstanding policy and declared that the US government would fund only international women's health groups that promoted 'natural' family planning - that is, abstinence - in underdeveloped countries. As English professor SC Neuman wrote in a 2006 paper published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, "Offred, in short, is a fictional product of 1970s feminism, and she finds herself in a situation that is a fictional realisation of the backlash against women's rights that gathered force during the early 1980s."

Not everyone in the US government at the time even opposed apartheid in South Africa: future vice president Dick Cheney was against the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, while Senator John McCain voted not to divest from the South African government. Recalling the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale that African-Americans have been resettled to "National Homelands" in the Midwest.
Puritanism and public policy
The Handmaid's Tale is always discussed as a feminist warning of sorts, and has also been interpreted as a commentary on sexism in the book of Genesis. But some of what Atwood describes wasn't merely speculation about the end result of the religious right taking power in the US but was based on what was happening elsewhere. Atwood says she was inspired in part by Nicolai Ceausescu's preoccupation with boosting female birth rates in Romania, which led to the policing of pregnant women and the banning of abortion and birth control, not to mention the murders of dissidents by the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines. The idea of 'giving' the offspring of lower classes to the ruling class came from Argentina, where a military junta seized power in 1976, subsequently 'disappearing' up to 500 children and placing them with selected leaders.

But American Puritanism is undoubtedly the central reference point in Atwood's text - and she drew connections between what was happening in the US in the 1980s and the original Puritan colonists in 17th Century New England. "Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already," Atwood wrote in The Guardian in 2012. "Thus... the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US - so went my thinking - was not the comparatively recent 18th-Century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-Century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself." Reagan himself referred to his dream of the US being a 'shining city on a hill,' coopting the term the Puritans had for their Massachusetts Bay colony.
Forever relevant?
Atwood's book was a hit with critics and readers, but the film adaptation four years later was a dud. The production's own difficulties showed how relevant it was: most studios wouldn't consider putting out a movie that was so heavily female, and many major actresses were afraid of the radical material. The 1990 film version is a sometimes serious, sometimes sexed-up version that squandered the talents of stars Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway. German director Volker Schlöndorff envisioned it as a sexual thriller, an obvious misinterpretation of the original material. Richardson as Offred, was not only stripped of her agency - the script avoided voiceover, losing the urgency of the book - she seemed more objectified than ever. Reviews were mostly dismissive, and the film failed at the box office, too, making back only $5m of its $13m budget.

Since then, The Handmaid's Tale has inspired a number of lower-profile adaptations and related works. Stage adaptations have been produced in the United States at Tufts University and for a UK tour. An opera by Poul Ruders premiered in Copenhagen in 2000, and was performed by the English National Opera in London in 2003 and by the Canadian Opera Company in 2004-05. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet offered up its interpretation of the story in 2013.

It wasn't until last year, when The Handmaid's Tale premiered on Hulu as a television series adaptation, that the work got its pop cultural due. The show's producers changed details to bring the series into the present day, including modern touchstones like Uber, Tinder, cappuccinos, and Craigslist in flashbacks to Offred's pre-handmaid life. But the series felt all the more chilling because of the massive shift in US politics with the election of Donald Trump, who was inaugurated just three months before the series premiered. Suddenly, the book and series' major flashpoints felt more possible than ever: a government declaring martial law after an attack by Islamic extremists, a regime that systematically eliminates gay people, a society that prioritises procreation (and subjugation of women) above all else. "[H]ow eerily prescient that the Republic of Gilead was established by a coup when Christian fundamentalists, revulsed by an overly liberal, godless, and promiscuous society, assassinated the president, machine-gunned Congress, declared a national state of emergency, and laid blame to 'Islamic fanatics,'" Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a Handmaid retrospective in 2006. "As in Orwell's 1984, the Republic consolidates its strength by maintaining continual wars against demonised 'enemies.'"

This all dovetailed with fears of Trump's authoritarian tendencies and his vice president's anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. Handmaid costumes even became common at protests of laws intended to limit women's reproductive freedom. The Women's March inspired by Trump's inauguration mirrored the TV series' flashback scenes of women in the streets protesting the stripping of their rights.

As The Handmaid's Tale returns for its second season, it feels more vital than ever, even though the cultural landscape has once again shifted in a major way for women. Since the last series, the #metoo movement has taken hold, and Offred's story is shifting with it. Without giving too much away about the second-season premiere, which goes, in some fashion, beyond the narrative in Atwood's novel, Offred is now finding methods to take back her own power in the oppressive regime and seizing those moments in satisfying ways - not unlike women finding power in telling their own stories via #metoo and #timesup. Of course, this isn't a coincidence; the producers of The Handmaid's Tale series were aware of the changing women's movement as they constructed this season.

Since the book's release, The Handmaid's Tale's most quoted phrase has been the one scratched, presumably by Offred's handmaid predecessor, in the wall of her room's cupboard: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down. It has become such a feminist rallying cry that many women have the phrase tattooed on their bodies. "Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe'en and also for protest marches - these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness," Atwood wrote for the Guardian. "Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book."

The Handmaid's Tale's messages and iconography feel more applicable than ever today. But we always seem to be saying that about Atwood's story. Will we be doing the same if yet another adaptation appears, three decades from now?
BBC Culture's Stories that shaped the world series looks at epic poems, plays and novels from around the globe that have influenced history and changed mindsets. A poll of writers and critics, 100 stories that shaped the world, will be announced in May and discussed live on stage at the Hay Festival 2018.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
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Why The Handmaid's Tale is so relevant today

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A white, wide-brimmed bonnet and a red cloak have come to mean one thing: women's oppression. Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale seared this image into our souls with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery to bear the children of the elite - and wear this uniform to underline their subservience.

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LibGuides: Dystopian Novels: Classic Dystopian Fiction

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A guide to fictional societies that are considered dystopian.

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Reading 1984, George Orwell's claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism, is still a shock. First comes the start of recognition: we recognise what he describes. Doublethink (holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time), Newspeak, the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love that deals in pain, despair and annihilates any dissident, the Ministry of Peace that wages war, the novel-writing machines that pump out pornography to buy off the masses: Orwell opened our eyes to how regimes worked.

Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online

But now we can read 1984 differently: with anxious apprehension, using it to measure where we, our nations and the world have got to on the road map to a hell Orwell described. Prophetic? Possibly. But stirring, moving, creative, undeniable and helpful? Yes. A book published on 8 June 1949, written out of the battered landscape of total war, in a nation hungry, tired and grey, feels more relevant than ever before, because Orwell's 1984 also arms us.

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The book, with its disorientating first sentence, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen", defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny. Winston Smith, the protagonist, works as a censor in the Ministry of Truth in a constant updating of history to suit present circumstances and shifting alliances. He and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing presence of Big Brother. In 1984 television screens watch you, and everyone spies on everyone else. Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online, and feeds an omniscient presence in our lives that can predict our every preference. Modelled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy.

Orwell understood that oppressive regimes always need enemies. In 1984 he showed how these can be created arbitrarily by whipping up popular feeling through propaganda. But in his description of the 'Two Minutes Hate' he also foresaw the way in which online mobs work. Obliged to watch the violent film, (as everyone is), Winston Smith observes "The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in...A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current". Now political, religious and commercial organisations all trade in whipping up feelings. Orwell uncannily identified the willing collusion in hate that such movements can elicit: and of course Winston observes it in himself. So, by implication might we, in ourselves.

Then there is Orwell's iconic dictator Big Brother: absurd and horrifying in equal measure. Orwell's writing is rooted in the struggles between the giant '-isms' that disfigured the 20th Century. He fought against Fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War (believing pacifism was a luxury paid for by other people) but realised the hollow promise of Communism, when the anti-Stalinist group he was fighting for was hunted down by the pro-Stalin faction. He witnessed first-hand the self-deception of true believers. Today there is another set of '-isms', such as nationalism and populism who operate through the mobilisation of that most dangerous of feelings, resentment. And everywhere you look in the contemporary world, 'strong' men are in positions of power. They share the need to crush opposition, a fanatical terror of dissent and self-promotion. Big Brothers are no longer a joke but strut the world.
Two plus two equals five
But the greatest horror in Orwell's dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language. The regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. Its real enemy is reality. Tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with phantoms and lies. Winston Smith's first audacious act of dissent had been to hide from the all-seeing camera and write a diary - to compose his own account of himself and his inner world. He knows that the acts of writing and describing mark him out for the death penalty if he is discovered. When he is finally broken by torture he agrees that "two plus two equals five." He had discovered that they could indeed "get inside you", and "Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterised out".

The terror in 1984 is the annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognise the real world. There is no fashionable or casual relativism in Orwell's work: he understands how hard it is to get things right. However, this story pins down the terror of a world where people have fewer and fewer words to use and whose thinking is distorted by ideologies.

All over the world where tyrannies rule 1984 is banned, but of course it is pirated. And sales have surged too in countries known as stable democracies. In India and the UK, in China and Poland people are turning to 1984. In the US, sales surged as people searched for a way of getting to grips with the reality of the Trump administration.

You cannot separate Orwell's work from the man. He is increasingly viewed as a kind of a saint ,but how he would laugh at the statues of him that are sprouting up. His views towards feminists (though not women), vegetarians and other groups would hardly pass the test now. But he was a man who lived by his beliefs. He made himself genuinely poor; he fought for what he thought was right; he was unfailingly generous and kind to other writers, and yet he taught himself to try and see the world as it was not how he would like it to be. He was never compliant, and forensically unearthed for our gaze the worst of himself. His aloof integrity is unique.

It is not only that we live in a world transformed by Orwell's insights in that it shapes how we see oppression. But 1984 is also handbook for difficult times. Knowledge is a kind of strength and we are all being tested.
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and Director of the Orwell Foundation. BBC Culture's Stories that shaped the world series looks at epic poems, plays and novels from around the globe that have influenced history and changed mindsets. A poll of writers and critics, 100 stories that shaped the world, will be announced in May.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
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Reading 1984, George Orwell's claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism, is still a shock. First comes the start of recognition: we recognise what he describes. Doublethink (holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time), Newspeak, the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love that deals in pain, despair and annihilates any dissident, the Ministry of Peace that wages war, the novel-writing machines that pump out pornography to buy off the masses: Orwell opened our eyes to how regimes worked.

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... released in 1984 !

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A Dystopia : an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.

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from lemonde.fr

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Un exemplaire du roman 1984, de George Orwell, dans la librairie The Last Bookstore, le 25 janvier 2017, à Los Angeles.
JUSTIN SULLIVAN / AFP

Quel rapport y a-t-il entre George Orwell et Donald Trump ? L'avènement d'une nouvelle expression : les " faits alternatifs ". Au cours de l'émission " Meet the Press ", dimanche 22 janvier, sur NBC, la conseillère de Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway a évoqué ce concept pour qualifier les propos du porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Sean Spicer, défendant la veille une contre-vérité grossière. Il prétendait que la cérémonie d'investiture de Donald Trump, le 20 janvier, avait été " la plus grande en termes d'audience ". Le porte-parole a également déclaré que " parfois nous pouvons être en désaccord avec les faits ". Le même jour, dans son discours devant la CIA, le nouveau président des Etats-Unis proférait un autre mensonge en prétendant que la pluie s'était arrêtée pendant son discours d'investiture - alors qu'elle a continué de tomber pendant toute son allocution.

Lire : Le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche au supplice des " faits alternatifs "

Dans ces deux interventions, Kellyanne Conway et Sean Spicer se livrent à un exercice bien particulier : ils transforment le sens d'un mot pour que ce dernier leur donne raison en dépit du bon sens. Un " désaccord sur les faits " ou l'existence de " faits alternatifs " n'est pas possible, un fait est un fait : soit il s'est produit, soit non. Certains faits demandent un long travail de vérification, d'autres pas. En l'occurrence, que la pluie se soit invitée à l'investiture de Donald Trump et que la foule se soit présentée moins nombreuse que pour l'investiture de Barack Obama en 2009 est incontestable. Le concept de " fait alternatif " permet de contourner cette difficulté en inventant une réalité parallèle dans laquelle la vérité pourrait être une simple question d'opinion.

Lire aussi Faits alternatifs, fake news, post-vérité... petit lexique de la crise de l'information

Le " novlangue " réactualisé à l'ère de Donald Trump

Cet exercice qui consiste à transformer le sens des mots n'a pas été inventé par Kellyanne Conway. En fait, un écrivain britannique lui avait déjà donné un nom au siècle dernier. Le " novlangue " ( Newspeak) est l'instrument du pouvoir omnipotent et omniprésent du roman 1984, de George Orwell, écrit en 1948 (d'où le titre, une inversion des deux chiffres de la décennie), et paru en 1949. Ce roman dystopique décrit un futur où le Parti règne sur l'Océania en réinventant une grammaire et un vocabulaire nouveaux, qui rendent impossibles la pensée critique et les idées politiques " non orthodoxes ".

Les événements de ce week-end rappelant des souvenirs de lecture à certains, le roman de George Orwell a connu un pic de ventes aux Etats-Unis, et s'est retrouvé en tête des best-sellers sur Amazon. Selon Craig Burke, le directeur de la communication de la maison d'édition Penguin, les ventes ont augmenté de 9 500 % depuis vendredi.

Capture d'écran du site de e-commerce Amazon.com. Le roman de George Orwell est n°1 des ventes sur le site depuis le 25 janvier.

Craig Burke a précisé au New York Timesque les commandes s'étaient envolées nettement dimanche, peu après l'interview de Kellyanne Conway sur NBC. Les lecteurs ont fait le rapprochement, notamment sur les réseaux sociaux, entre le discours de Mme Conway et le roman, et cet engouement a " suivi son chemin de lui-même ", selon Craig Burke. La maison Penguin a dû commander 70 000 exemplaires supplémentaires pour faire face à la demande, et envisage une réimpression. Ailleurs dans le monde, les éditeurs de George Orwell constatent aussi un regain d'intérêt. " Il y a effectivement un pic de ventes ", juge Jess Harrisson, éditrice chez Penguin à Londres. Elle précise cependant que 1984 est toujours un best-seller, vendu à 100 000 exemplaires au cours de l'année écoulée dans les pays anglophones.

Car 1984 décrit de nombreux dangers de la modernité politique, y compris l'essor des technologies de surveillance incarnées par Big Brother, qui en ont fait une référence largement partagée - les auteurs de cette rubrique ne sauraient le nier. En 2013, les ventes de 1984 avaient explosé dans la foulée des révélations du lanceur d'alerte américain Edward Snowden sur les programmes de surveillance de masse d'Internet.

Le livre, une valeur refuge

Mais selon les éditeurs interrogés par le New York Times, d'autres romans dystopiques se vendent plus que d'habitude ces derniers jours. Sur Amazon, Le Meilleur des mondes, d'Aldous Huxley, se classe également parmi les meilleures ventes, de même qu' Impossible ici, du prix Nobel américain Sinclair Lewis. Ce roman, qui raconte la prise de pouvoir d'un démagogue aux Etats-Unis, a été réédité vendredi dernier en Angleterre, la première fois depuis sa sortie, en 1935. Les éditions Penguin s'apprêtent à commander une deuxième réimpression.

De son côté, un journaliste du Guardian, Alex Hern, a pris les devants en conseillant aux lecteurs d'autres romans qui correspondent encore mieux selon lui à la situation présente que 1984, dont La Servante écarlate, de Margaret Atwood (1985) et Les Fils de l'homme, de P.D. James (2006).

Article réservé à nos abonnés Lire aussi Retour vers le futur. 2|6 : " 1984 ", la société écran

D'une manière générale, les périodes de crise ou de désarroi collectif se traduisent souvent dans les ventes de livres, objets perçus comme une " valeur refuge ". Souvenons-nous que, peu après les attentats qui frappèrent Paris et Saint-Denis le 13 novembre 2015, le récit autobiographique d'Ernest Hemingway Paris est une fête, s'était rapidement retrouvé en rupture de stock, encouragé en partie par l'injonction de Danielle, une avocate de 77 ans devenue une célébrité sur les réseaux sociaux après avoir conseillé la lecture de Hemingway aux Parisiens sur l'antenne de BFM-TV. Les éditions Gallimard avaient dû réimprimer " en urgence " un texte qui, à la différence du roman d'Orwell, était jusqu'ici plutôt confidentiel.

Article réservé à nos abonnés Lire aussi Le livre, ce remède souverain

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" 1984 " de George Orwell est en tête des ventes aux Etats-Unis

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Quel rapport y a-t-il entre George Orwell et Donald Trump ? L'avènement d'une nouvelle expression : les " faits alternatifs ". Au cours de l'émission " Meet the Press ", dimanche 22 janvier, sur NBC, la conseillère de Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway a évoqué ce concept pour qualifier les propos du porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Sean Spicer, défendant la veille une contre-vérité grossière.

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Oxford Dictionary definition and pronunciation

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utopia | Definition of utopia in English by Oxford Dictionaries

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Definition of utopia - an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect

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Animated Sparknotes video
This short video will give you a good overview of the novel if you don't feel ready to read it yet.
/!\ SPOILERS

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The graphic novel version of Orwell's masterpiece

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An extract from the movie