Fahrenheit 451 -

Ray Bradbury

Simon & Schuster

2012

176 páginas

5h 52m

ISBN-13: 9781451690316

Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

Resenhas (5)

2 (Razoável)

Short but bitter

Fahrenheit 451 is a very strange book. It mixes a somewhat poetic language with a political discourse and a heavy criticism of the American Way of Life in the beginning of the fifties. Ray Bradbury here created a disjointed world, full of hyperboles and predictions as absurd as one may conceive. He predicted that the television would occupy such a central place in people’s lives that it would eventually replace books, thoughts and ultimately relationships. The book creates many threads, but hardly ever unravels any of them, bringing together a convoluted amalgamate of concepts, situations and characters, which are almost all disposable and have a very mild impact on the plot.

First things first: the story here revolves around a fireman named Montag, whose job is to go with his fellow firemen to houses suspected to have books. There, they burn the books, the house and sometimes the person residing in it. Montag has a wife so immersed into the life of thoughtlessness that she only watches TV and does nothing of her own, considering the characters seen on her gigantic television as members of her family. Finally, the fireman meets a young lady who seems to escape from all the madness that has taken over society. After this setting, things quickly go downhill: many situations and characters appear and disappear, extensive and boring explanations are given to the functioning of the society, and supposedly “shocking” moments are presented in a way which makes them utterly predictable.

Nevertheless, there is one surprising and jaw-dropping moment, but it might not be for everyone’s taste – it will appeal to those who are fond of gory and/or repulsive events. After that, however, the book slowly descends to a halt, to culminate in a very weird and anti-climactic ending which is totally unreal and far from any possible plausibility. It leaves tons of questions floating, and the whole trail leading to its conclusion is saturated with illogic and confusing developments. How does this society work? Who controls the government? What is the war about? How does one beat an unbeatable dog? It is never made perfectly clear. It even seems that this book was written hurriedly and that it was cut short for some unknown reason – its length is inappropriately short for a dystopia. In a nutshell: short, but bitter.