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reviewed We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (Hardcover, 1972, Viking Press)

We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, …

One can never leave the One State.

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.