We

Wouldn't think it'd take me nearly two weeks to read a 200 page novel. I really didn't enjoying reading this. It's not a bad book, Ursula K. Le Guin called it "the best single work of science fiction yet written". My 1 star is purely personal. It was a triumph I managed to have every page pass before my eyeballs.

My problem is entirely in the stylized, nearly experimental writing style of the book. Very modern, by the 1920s standard. It felt like trying to watch the movie Metropolis instead of a contemporary fun movie: it's brilliant and innovative but so awkward as to be unenjoyable. Enormous amount of symbolism went right past me as I desperately tried to hold on to the basic story. I tried hard with We. Read a bunch of two different translations, scanned several others. Finally read a Cliff's Notes style plot summary which at least let me get through the book.

The book has strengths! It's an interesting dystopia about a totalitarian society. It has some funny sex in it. There's something very imaginative here. Orwell's review connects it to Brave New World, then used it as inspiration for writing 1984. Also the book has a role it played as an example of Soviet dissident literature (although as Orwell points out, that's not entirely accurate). Perhaps if I were a student of modernist literature or 20th century Russian fiction I would find it more interesting.