We The Living (Ayn Rand)

Ayn Rand's first novel and a cathartic, semi-autobiographical tale of life in Communist Russia. It's amazing to think that English is not her first language when you read this gritty prose, prose that brings the bitter cold of winter felt through ragged clothes right up to your nose. The plotline reads like a Romance--a woman caught in a triangle with two men, different in every way. One representing the free soul, being torn apart by a dictatorship, and the other the man who represents that government in an idealistic (perhaps ignorant) way, full of the idealism of Marx. Political and philosophical, Rand begins to explain her life's philosophy of Objectivism and, I think, reveals from where this theory emerged--growing up in such a brutally cold environment--cold unheated flats, cold to the arts and sciences, cold to the individual spirit. I swear, I had to put on an extra pair of socks during this one and couldn't stop thinking of those Primus stoves. A Primus for every family as the only means of cooking. Funny to think that I own a Primus, for camping of couse, of how an object can transcend geography and time, how a stove can mentally link my backpacking adventures and the meatless tacos I cook to the struggle for survival (and spiritual death) in the Communist Russia of the last century.