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kvclements 's review for:
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
This is a very weird book. It's written in a very strange fashion that almost seems like the ravings of a madman or like someone trapped in a dream. Like its descendants "Brave New World" and "1984," "We" is a chilling tale of a "utopia" that tries to make people act as close to machines as possible, culminating in a lobotomy of the imagination. Having a "soul" is considered an illness, and for D-503, the protagonist whose journal we are reading, everything changes when he meets the intoxicating and enigmatic woman I-330.
Since we are only seeing this world through D-503's journal, we get only tantalizing hints of what this glass utopian world looks like, and D-503 seems incapable of writing a complete, coherent sentence of dialogue. I don't know if that's just the style of the author or partially a problem with translating from Russian, but it was a bit frustrating trying to understand what was going on. "1984" and "Brave New World" are much more accessible to a modern audience, and while I recommend reading "We" at least once, because it is an interesting style and there's some lovely imagery in it, I did not enjoy myself enough to read it again.
Since we are only seeing this world through D-503's journal, we get only tantalizing hints of what this glass utopian world looks like, and D-503 seems incapable of writing a complete, coherent sentence of dialogue. I don't know if that's just the style of the author or partially a problem with translating from Russian, but it was a bit frustrating trying to understand what was going on. "1984" and "Brave New World" are much more accessible to a modern audience, and while I recommend reading "We" at least once, because it is an interesting style and there's some lovely imagery in it, I did not enjoy myself enough to read it again.