2025 Readings 88

 A couple weeks ago, during the weekly Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill, Sandy told me that he had just finished Yevgeny Zamaytin's novel We. Once again, I was reminded of my gaping chasm of knowledge, created by my shamefully adequate Hoosier upbringing. We is a dystopian novel, written in the early days of the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Truthfully, it's rather amazing that it was published, and that Zamaytin survived; apparently, he later directly appealed to Joseph Stalin, and was inexplicably allowed to leave the country (sometimes real life is much stranger than fiction). The hero of the story, D-503, lives, like everyone else, in a glass apartment (a lovely metaphor for life in a totalitarian regime), so rebels, unsuccessfully, against the state. I was thinking that it might be a good choice as a side reading for my film class on Fascism for the spring, but I don't think my students would be able to make much of it (or, I'd have to devote more time to helping them get something out of it than I have to spare). That said, I'm glad I read it, and am looking forward to read it again down the road. I don't think I liked it as much as I thought I would have, but, then, it's hard to get much joy out of reading about an authoritarian regime when you're living in a proto-authoritarian state.