My alphabetical reading list is done. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We takes up the tail end of my journey through the alphabet. This dismal piece of writing (and I’m not talking about the dystopian setting) is a perfect end for the self-imposed restrictions on my reading choices. This book was so bad it makes my newfound freedom even more delightful.

We, written in 1920, takes place in the 26th century A.D. The narrator of the tale is named D-503. All people have numbers, actually all people are called numbers in the world of the OneState. OneState is the winner of the 200 Year War, which seems to have ended sometime in the 23rd century. The war killed off 99.8% of the population. The survivors live in a walled in city, ruled by the elusive Benefactor. Their lives are dictated by the strict rules of hyper-rationality. Every second of their day is planned out for them highly structured timetable. The unbreakable rules of Mathematics are the basis for everything in the society, including the mechanical creation of music, poetry and literature.

The novel opens up with D-503 writing his memoirs of sorts. He is the creator of the INTGERAL, the first intergalactic spaceship. The INTGERAL’s mission is to travel to other planets and colonize them. Loaded onto the INTEGERAL will be all kinds of testaments about the greatness of the OneState, over the irrationality of freedom. The idea being that the inhabitants of the planet will read these ‘beautiful’ pieces of prose and agree to coming under the control of The Benefactor. If they don’t agree to go along with OneState, the INTGERAL’s got some kind of weapon that will annihilate its enemies. D-503 is writing his memoirs to go along with the colonizing mission.

While writing his memoirs though something unexpected happens. He begins to grow a soul. That irrational element in a person that knows good and evil and desires free will.

This is a problem, since it goes against everything the society stands for. The society believes itself to the ultimate pinnacle of human endeavors. The paradise Adam and Eve had been exiled from by their freedom and rebellion has been recaptured by the total renunciation of freedom under the cold rules of mathematics.

The novel from here goes on to show the narrators growing awareness of himself as more than a number as he involves himself with a small but rebellious minority. In this way the novel is typical dystopian fare similar to 1984 and Brave New World.

Problems

I started reading his novel before going to bed. I read the first thirty or so pages (about four chapters) and found the story to be engaging. The narrator was creating the society for someone reading his work that wouldn’t be familiar with just an advanced civilization. The pace was nice, he was telling the story but also explaining things to the reader. It was interesting.

So I go to sleep, and in the morning pick the book up over a morning cup of coffee and find myself thrown into some kind of nonsensical symbolism. Huh? Is this the same book I was reading? The novel never really returned to explaining imaginative creations that the society had. Actually the novel never really returned to explaining very much of what was going on, from who was speaking or to when an action was happening. I don’t know if this was the author’s fault, or the translators. Reading the introduction to the book the translator showed that his grasp of writing coherent prose was weak at best.

Take this line from the introduction:
We is a Russian novel that first saw the light of day in English in New York. If it were not a Russian novel, that publication history would be moderately spectacular, but under the circumstances it is merely unusual. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Nadezhad Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, and many another twentieth-century Russian classic have all come out first on foreign soil and in a language other than Russian

Besides being poorly written this first paragraph in the introduction doesn’t mean anything. What would make the novel’s publication history ‘moderately spectacular’? If it was one of the thousands of book that first sees the light of day in New York any year? If it was a French novel per se that was first published in New York? I don’t know, I would think that it was because of it’s Samizdat quality, and it’s émigré status coming out of Communist Russia, but in the next clause I am told that it being a 20th century Russian classic published first in New York is really no big deal.

Am I being anal? Yes, but this horrible use of language continues throughout the entire novel. Many times the simple plot confounded me just because of bad transitions, grammatically awkward sentences and convoluted wordiness. I don’t know whose fault it is, but after reading ten pages of similar sentences to the one quoted above I have a sinking feeling that it’s more the translators fault than the authors.

I have some other problems with the book and while I was working today I formulated them in my head, but really I don’t think anyone would care to read them. Maybe I’ll update this review tomorrow with them. They all have to do with philosophical problems contained in the book and holes in the basic plot of the novel that you could drive an army of really big trucks through. I was also going to complain about the linguistic use of the word I in a society that doesn’t believe in the individual. Since the narrator is a true believer at the start of the novel, one would imagine he would never use just an ideologically suspect pronoun over and over again. I’m being pretentious though.

Recommendation

This novel bored the pants off of me. More than half of the novel did nothing for the plot and just confused me for no apparent reason. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, everything good in this novel has been borrowed and improved on in Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 and in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Possibly a better translation might have made the read a little more enjoyable, but it wouldn’t have helped the boring plot. The novel never dives into its philosophical qualities to any depth. Any of its ‘deep thoughts’ never get any deeper than the deep end of a wading pool. As an action novel it fails by never creating any kind of suspense. Even in the climax when the narrator meets up with The Benefactor the meeting is glossed over and then ended abruptly by the narrator deciding mid paragraph to start talking about something else. Maybe it’s kind of important how he saw his landlady later that day, but to break up the moment of resolution in the novel with just a banal thought almost made he throw the novel at the couple of homeless guys getting drunk down the street from where I was sitting. (Not that there was much resolution to be had in the novel.)

I hate to say this, but I wanted to hero of this novel to die. I wanted the society to win, just because the arguement for having freedom was never articulated except in a whiny negative manner. Unlike say Winston Smith in 1984 I had no feeling that this character would ever really be better off by having a soul, and being able to make his own decisions.

If you are a fan of the dystopian genre, you will probably be called to this novel even over my complaints (I know I would be). The novel’s a quick read so it won’t be a huge investment on your part; but I would recommend not reading the Penguin version. There is a mass-market version available. Maybe it’s better, but at least it’s a few dollars cheaper.


Recommended:
No