Tuesday 10 November 2009

Melting pot

Welcome!

I hope you enjoy reading my posts and will want to share some of your thoughts as well.
At the moment I'm reading Ayn Rand's Anthem and at times I feel I'm inside a melting pot. Images of  Brave New World, Farenheit 451º and the likes get mixed up with those of more tender stories I can't quite identify so clearly, with Shirley Valentine for some reason, too, and I also see it dealing with timeless social issues that sometimes appear more politically dressed but abound in everyday life.


It doesn't, however, remind me of any Russian writings I've read -which was a surprise- and I find Ms Rand's tone in her introduction quite different from the one used in the story -as befits a gifted writer.
I'll be finishing it shortly. More on it when I do...

2 comments:

Daniella said...

An intriguing first post Beatriz! I'm interested to find out more. Let us know when you finish, would you recommend it?

Blog's looking great, I especially like your link to your complete profile as it stops the page from looking cluttered!

Well done!

Beatriz Lupiano said...

Thank you! I took the idea of having widgets and profile on the left from your blog, actually. I find it much easier to focus on the different areas.
As for the book...I haven't finished it yet, but so far I'd recommend it (I have a friend who's read it and wouldn't though).

The thing is that, as one of my former Professors would say, you can often see "the seams"; Ms Rand's work, even her fiction, has a very strong and explicit, I'd say, ideological stance. But in this one (my first fiction by her) I think you can go beyond what you (I) assume to be her political views and actually see it happen in any community.
The narrator, though an individual person, refers to himself as "we" and to other individuals as "they", because that's what their regime requires them to do (and think). There are rules you can't break but the explanations for having them don't always make sense. That happens in real life...and challenging the status quo is often discouraged -perhaps not as explicitly as in the book. But I've definitely seen it happen.

Thanks very much for your interest, Daniella