asiporaspoonful 's review for:

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

4.0

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I’m really torn about this book. Partly, I’m upset that I didn’t know how hugely it impacted Orwell’s conceptual development of 1984. There are soooo many common plot points, societal rules, characters, and motifs. It truly boggles the mind. In some ways, I feel I have to give the book credit for helping to manifest 1984, which I feel is so important, and at the same time, my opinions on the originality of 1984 are certainly diminished now from knowing this exists and being familiar with it. With that said, there are many things that make this book hard to follow and detract from its success. Though it’s very clear why an author would choose to use a letter/number combo for character names (to accentuate their dehumanizing effect), because the characters don’t have names, it took me til the very end of the book to actually understand and recall who was being spoken about in the scenes. Besides that, the casual racism used in describing a character who was supposedly the protagonist’s best friend was hard to stomach. If I wasn’t committed to reading the book for my own dystopian literary knowledge, I would have left off many times. Besides that, the audio version I listened to had several excellent essays, the best of which was Ursula Le Guin’s which came at the end and contemplated the censorship the author experienced and what censorship means and how it functions in different societies.