We, Before Orwell Got There

Read this in the Ginsburg translation, which apparently matters, I saw a few people comparing translations like it was a different book depending who did it. I only had the one copy so I can’t weigh in, but it’s worth knowing going in, this one wasn’t written in English and something’s always sitting between you and the original.

D-503 is a rocket engineer, a numbers guy, and the whole book is his journal, which he starts as a straight piece of propaganda for OneState and which slowly stops making sense as a woman named I-330 gets into his head. Watching a mind that trusts math above everything try to account for a feeling it has no formula for, that’s the book. Not the glass buildings, not the surveillance, though all that’s there too and it’s where 1984 and Brave New World clearly went shopping. The bureaucracy detail that stuck with me most, everyone gets a pink ticket to schedule their government-approved sex hour and pull the curtain shut. That’s colder than anything in Orwell, because it’s not menace, it’s paperwork.

O-90 is the one nobody talks about enough, she loves D-503 plainly and gets nothing back that resembles it, and by the end she’s the only person in the book who does something genuinely brave, not the revolutionaries, her. Ending’s rough, the Great Operation bit, everyone gets their imagination surgically removed and D-503 just watches it happen to him like weather. Didn’t expect that gut-punch on a night shift where I was mostly reading to stay awake.

Four stars. Dated in places, translation-dependent, still the blueprint. Cover file we’re running looks off, small and a little washed out, worth a second look before this goes live.