We the Living

We the Living
by Ayn Rand

We the Living
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Book Summary Information

Author: Ayn Rand
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 0451226852
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: NAL Trade

Book Reviews of We the Living

Book Review: Her one good book
Summary: 3 Stars

Ayn Rand wrote one good book, her first one, a novel titled We the Living. When it was published in the 1930's it was reviewed favorably as a novel of ideas. And rightly so. Her better known novels, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, might usefully be described as novels of length, or not novels at all. Long-winded, outrageously polemical diatribes might be a better characterization. Fountainhead is the only novel I've read which romanticizes rape. (I guess it depends on who is doing the raping.) Atlas Shrugged contains an 80-plus page disquisition on the meaning and value of money. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a torturously non-sensical treatise on political economy? (Alan Greenspan's close association with Ayn Rand may account for his mumbling incoherence and the disastrous failure of his policies. Come to think of it, W's last Secretary of Commerce was an Objectivist, as well.)

Insofar as th substance of We the Living is concerned, if you've read one of Ayn Rand's novels, you've read them all. This one just happens to be have more subtlety and style. Yes, the novels get longer and more overwhelmingly reactionary as time goes by, but the themes are the same: romantic heroes and heroines determined not to compmromise with a trashy, mediocritizing collectivist system. Unwanted pregnancies and subsequent back-alley abortions for collectivized women, but our heroines commitment to unbridled romantic love magically wards off the need for contraception. (One wonders how Objectivists procreate.) It's better to freeze to death (smililng with joy) in deep drifts of snow, experiencing an exhilirating sense of liberation, than to be reduced to the status of a collectivized robot. Collectivized mediocrity eventually reduces physical and intellectual promise to flabby, dispirited passivity. The monetary price of anything represents its true value. Pragmatism is a curse that eventually leads to unmitigated collectivization. And stylistically, artistic understatement is hypocrisy.

Many readers, no doubt, think of Ayn Rand as a libertarian. Even libertatians, however, usually acknowledge that accidents of birth, circumstances of upbringing, and contingencies of the life course make a substantial contribution to how we see the world and what we do. For Ayn Rand, however, all this is just so much collectivist weakness. Her heroes are thoroughly willful and self-determining characters in Twentieth Century Robinsinades. They stand apart, and seemingly have done so since birth, uninfluenced by anything but forces from within. How did those forces get there? Rand doesn't even acknowledge the issue. Perhaps Rand's heroes start off as a super species of feral children.

Maybe Ayn Rand sold out. Rather than develop her real gifts as a novelist, she sought a much larger following with ham-handed appeals to the young, the inexperienced, and the romantically reactionary. There's no subtlety or style in the work that followed We the Living and her second novel, Anthem, but Ayn Rand did gain a large following of proponents of her objectivist philosophy. Literary appeal for big-bucks bellicosity. Hardly seems a fair trade.

Summary of We the Living

The first literary work of one of the most influential philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century-available for the first time in trade paperback.

Ayn Rand wrote of her first novel, We the Living, "It is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. The plot is invented, the background is not...The specific events of Kira's life were not mine: her ideas, her convictions, her values, were and are." We the Living depicts the struggle of the individual against the state, and the impact of the Russian Revolution on three human beings who demand the right to live their own lives and pursue their own happiness. It tells of a young woman's passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state.

This classic novel is not a story of politics, but of the men and women who have to struggle for existence behind the banners and slogans.

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