Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - We

Reviews tagging 'Racial slurs'

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

6 reviews

maddb_96's review against another edition

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Enjoyed the start of this book but the last 3 quarters were not very easy to follow.

Some of the concepts I liked were: everything being reduced to mathematics to eliminate harm, dreaming meaning a person is ill, having an imagination being illegal and having to have an operation to remove it, everyone having to live by a timetable and do things at exactly the same time, houses being made of glass so everything was always observed, having to have a pink ticket to have sex with someone (and this being the only time a blind was allowed to be used).

I feel like it had really good potential and some great lines in there but overall I just didn’t feel connected to the story/protagonist. Maybe it was hard to follow bc the protagonist seemed mentally unwell to the point where he didn’t even know who he was and I was confused about why that was and how that played into the story.

Also it seemed racist at points, he kept referring to ‘African lips’ and I get that it was written like 100 years ago but it just made me dislike it even more.

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saraaaa's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective sad tense fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

It's a great book. One of the first of its kind. This novel was written between 1919 and 1921. Huxley claimed to have not read it before the publication of Brave New World; George Orwell, on the other hand, read it and thoroughly enjoyed it, so it's safe to say it might have been of inspiration for 1984.
Although this reads more similar to Animal Farm, with its bitter irony, facing the readers with the cold hard truth of the situation and letting them come to a conclusion fn their own. A fine piece of literature, in this sense.
It's full of mathematical and even biblical references, but nothing too hard for the common reader, and offers some brilliant, very modern philosophical and sociological considerations – truly a book that makes you think.
There were some racist descriptions and misogynistic observations that made me physically wince – were the prejudices really so engraved in Zamjatin's head that he couldn't imagine they would have not persisted in a culture 900 years into the future?
Apart from this, it was almost funny to note how technologically "backwards" (though I hate this term) such a culture was if compared to ours, just a century after the novel was written. Really puts into perspective how much has been discovered and invented in so little time, and how unexpected this development must've been.
But back to the book. I'd say by the end of story, it gets almost unbearably slow – otherwise it's a very quick read –, but I guess I have to take into account that this was a reread for me. Still, I highly recommend it – has to be read at least once in a lifetime.

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