We
Yevgeny Zamyatin, c.1921
Premise
D-503 is a mathematician who lives in the One State, a far-future
society in which individual freedom has been minimized and the
"ciphers" who make up the population live their lives according
to the Table of Hours.
Reaction
Couldn't finish. We was supposedly the major inspiration for
Nineteen Eighty-Four, but whereas Orwell
grounded his work by bringing to it the same journalistic voice he used
to write his accounts of poverty in Britain, We is a stream of
consciousne— no, make that a swamp of consciousness. Zamyatin
disdained conventional language, and the translator of the edition I read
attempted to preserve as much as possible of his eccentric style, full
of abstractions, fragments, and sentences that trail off into nothing.
It's unbearable.
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