Jim Fulner reviewed We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
One can never leave the One State.
3 stars
I liked We, or at least I didn't NOT like it. I don't know, I might not be smart enough to understand Russian literature, even translated into my native tongue. The story is fine, a brilliant mathematician doing the work to design the spaceship that will bring organization and reason to planets beyond our imagination, but in the process meets a girl, its always a girl isn't it, who introduces freedom to his life and turns the world upside down.
I guess I really didn't like the love interest, this I-330 character, particularly as our protagonist D-503 had a fine familial triangle with O and R before she showed up like the little homewrecker, she is, How I can say that in a world that everyone is everyone else's property including the sexual use of whomever you please, as long as it's within the rhythms of her cycle, …
I liked We, or at least I didn't NOT like it. I don't know, I might not be smart enough to understand Russian literature, even translated into my native tongue. The story is fine, a brilliant mathematician doing the work to design the spaceship that will bring organization and reason to planets beyond our imagination, but in the process meets a girl, its always a girl isn't it, who introduces freedom to his life and turns the world upside down.
I guess I really didn't like the love interest, this I-330 character, particularly as our protagonist D-503 had a fine familial triangle with O and R before she showed up like the little homewrecker, she is, How I can say that in a world that everyone is everyone else's property including the sexual use of whomever you please, as long as it's within the rhythms of her cycle, I don't know. But I felt O was a fine girl and I-330 never seemed to really love D-503 but was very mysterious and I guess some men go for that.
It was not a happy ending, which I never like, and I almost did not read it since the book's introduction itself told me it would not be a happy ending. I almost brought it right back to the library.
But it is told interestingly, through a bit of a diary, including several mentions like this will be the last I write to you, unknown reader followed by several more chapters when apparently not.