In the month of January, 2017, British author George Orwell’s most famous book 1984, became a sudden bestseller in the United States, rising to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. This unusual and immediate success led its publisher to print tens of thousands of new copies.
The revival of this book came about after an interview that Kellyanne Conway, one of Donald’s Trump advisers, gave on CNN’s Meet The Press.
On the left Obama’s inauguration and on the right Trump’s inauguration
To defend a false claim by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, that Donald Trump had attracted the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration”, Kellyanne Conway used a phrase that, to many observers, reminded them of the typically dystopian writing of 1984.
Ms Conway said that Mr Spicer gave “alternative facts”. This is not possible, however, because a fact is just a fact and its truth can’t be altered. Recently, on social networks, people have been commenting on the similarities that they found between the way Orwell wrote and Ms Conway’s answers.
The definition of the word fact according to Merriam-Webster is as follows: “a piece of information presented as having objective reality”.
Interest in 1984 has grown a lot, even outside the United States and compared to the past year sales have increased by 20% in Australia and the UK. It has been said that this type of dystopian novel is striking a chord with the people.
Professor Stefan Collini of Cambridge University – an expert about George Orwell, and a teacher of history – enunciated that he thinks that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Donald Trump distorted the facts to convince people to be on his side, just like Big Brother did in the famous novel. He also said that the book was remembered as a book that contains different parodies of official distortions.
By Michele Sarcinella and Gaia Colli