Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29950 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

Rand's Greatest!
We the Living is Ayn Rand at her greatest. Her phenomenal writing talent moves the story along at a fascinating pace. The characters are totally believable. They don't become the non-human symbols of people which populate her other two masterpieces (although they're all fascinating, you can't relate to them on a human level). She manages to interweave her philosophy in bits and pieces, rather than the page-after-page rants in Atlas Shrugged. Kira, though, is a frustrating heroine to admire. While she treats Andrei like crap, she pours her life into Leo, a fascinating but brutal hero. Also, if a basic tenent of her philosophy is self-reliance, of holding no one higher than one self, one wonders why Kira becomes dependent on Leo, and sacrifices so much for him. In re-reading this masterpiece again and again, I kept thinking of how Rand was using Greta Garbo as her heroine. Also, the Italian movie made of "We the Living" is an absolute must-see for any admirer of this book. It runs over 3 hours and is amazingly faithful to the book. To think that this film was made in Italy and not in Russia is a shock. And to think it was made right at the height of World War II, with bombs exploding all over the place, makes it even more extraordinary.

By far the best of Ayn's Rand Fictional Endeavors
I read the Fountainhead first, then Atlas Shrugged, then We The Living. We The Living is by far the most moving, engaging, and realistic of these novels. How interesting that this was her first novel; written, presumably, before her Objectivist Philosophy had taken full shape, and taken over all other considerations. The novel's strengths lie in the believability of the characters; their motives are human and their actions and circumstances realistic rather than idealistic. I was truly drawn into all of her novels, however We The Living made clear to me the problems in her later novels-- in the later novels, Ayn Rand ceased to consider plot and character as useful ends unto themselves, and began utilizing them solely as mechanisms by which to disseminate her philosophy. We the Living is strong because her characters struggle to maintain the heroic integrity she assigns them. In her later books, the love stories she created lack the passion and innocence (and believability) found in We The Living. If Ayn Rand's goal was to present to the world a philosophy for man to live by on earth, We The Living is the only one of her fictional novels in which the plot and character are believable enough to have have existed on this earth.

Excellent debut
This book was one of my greatest literary pleasures and surprises in recent years. I had somehow managed not to read anything by this writer, even though the genre this book can be categorized in is probably my favorite, i.e., classic Russian literature. Apparently, Ayn Rand grew up in Russia, in the same period as this book (early twentieth century), and it's clear that she still had a huge Russian influence when she wrote it, because in some aspects it is almost indistinguishable from the style and atmosphere of the Russian greats. She seems to also have inherited a great deal of passion, and she excels at expressing her beliefs in noble and beautiful ways. Her characters are well-drawn, deep, realistic and diversified, and she was obviously an intelligent and perspicacious woman, who had a good grasp of the human psyche in all its varied forms. Her depiction of the incredible and impossible conditions which people had to suffer through in this period in Russia is extremely well-written, as is all the absurdity of the communist doctrine, and how it made people act and even think. I think I can say that Ayn Rand has become one of my favorite writers through one book alone, and I look forward with the greatest pleasure to read the rest of her work.