The book that inspired 1984, Anthem and Brave New World. The plot, on paper, is certainly interesting and the book achieves what it sets out to do, a critique of relinquishing individuality to the collective, but honestly? It's just not very engaging.

On a surface level, we see a totalitarian state from the perspective of the main character, D-503, who begins to get ideas of rebelling after falling in love with a woman. I can certainly see how it could be likened to 1984. However the story telling is nothing alike- Zamyatin's prose is boring (though this may be the fault of the translation, I feel that it would be a difficult to novel translate). There is little sense of urgency or claustrophobia, and there are one too many times in which the main character is saved from punishment for dissent to the point it becomes hard to believe this society is as calculating or totalitarian as described. At no point in the book was I taken with any of the characters (I did not even feel that D-503 would benefit from having a 'soul' or any individuality), and the relationships between them sometimes feel so abrupt and manufactured that they don't really justify any of the actions that take place. In fact, descriptions of anything at all is completely lacking, Zamyatin has a strange habit of choosing to hyper-fixate on small details of characters (for instance, it feels like he describes the lip shape of the main woman more than he describes anything else about her, including her personality). Interesting stylistic feature, yes, but doesn't hold well in a science fiction novel.

It's occasionally beautiful, but ultimately difficult to follow given that at times it simply feels rushed with bad transitions, grammatically awkward sentences and abstract wordiness. At some points it feels like Zamyatin got up to take a smoke break, forgot what he was writing and decided to start a new line of thought. Descriptions of place and settings are too stream-of-consciousness and abstract, which doesn't work for the book when Zamyatin invariably decides to throw you into action, where he seems to expect you to have some concrete knowledge of what's happening in order to get anything out of it (spoiler alert: you won't). Nothing here is particularly 'deep' either and any potentially climactic moment gets intercepted by something banal, then never brought up again.

This will probably always be considered a science fiction classic and I'm happy it inspired so many books. I want to give credit to Zamyatin for his ideas at his core, but I do think there were a lot of flaws in his writing.

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