TBR Jar Review: We the Living by Ayn Rand

I’ve always been a little intimidated by Ayn Rand, because I’ve always thought she wrote really high-brow literary fiction which isn’t really my thing. But at the same time I’ve always felt like you “ought” to read Ayn Rand. So I finally did, and I think I can safely say that while I had no reason to be intimidated, her writing probably isn't for me. 

The book is about a group of young people living in Russia some years after the revolution. The communist party is really getting into gear and setting up for world domination, and we follow these young people as they try to live their lives in-between the rules and regulations of the leaders of the country. 

We mainly follow Kira, a young woman who is branded bourgeois by the government, as her father owned a factory before the revolution and they were well-to-do. Being branded bourgeois makes life very much harder, and the fact that the family resists the new leadership doesn’t help. 

Kira meets two young men, one a member of the secret police and one a fellow bourgeois who has had a run-in with the police and must escape. Both men fall in love with her, but she tries to keep her relationship with them separate from each other. Slowly (VERY slowly) life starts to unravel as events unfold, leading to the disillusionment of pretty much everyone in the book. 

This book was very bleak, as most book set in Communist Russia are, and there was not much plot. The book was mainly about the struggles everyone had to endure in order to survive under the communist rule and try to hold on to some little part of themselves, while the government insisted that there could be no private life or “self”. Everything must be for the good of society. Pretty much every character suffered some form of disillusionment, whether they started out believing in the communist cause or they resisted it. This made for depressing reading and the lack of a larger plot made it worse. 

As for the relationships in the book I didn’t really understand Kira and her feelings. She had total insta-love with Leo, and loved him throughout, but then she also seemed to love Andrei. I couldn’t figure out if she actually did, or if she just used him for connections. Andrei was the easiest to understand. He believed in the cause, he loved Kira, he started questioning things. Leo, on the other hand, was an enigma to me. I never understood his behavior. He seemed to be rebelling against everything, not caring about consequences, ruining things for himself and testing Kira’s love constantly. I didn’t care for him at all. And I didn’t like that Kira continued to love him in the face of all that. 

This book was mostly boring and bleak. There were some few good moments of character development and the writing was very good. But as for the plot and the characters in general I found it boring. I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

The next book from my jar is “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch” by apparently Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett together? That should be interesting! I like Neil Gaiman, and I have only heard good things about Terry Pratchett, so I’m looking forward to things. It should also be a lighter read than “We the Living”…