"Man...Men...Man...Man...Men" - Ayn Rand (Not necessarily in that order)
I just bought a (used!) paperback copy of Ayn Rand's "We the living" - the cover has a typical painting of a woman on her knees in front of a man who looks away. Apparently the plot is about a communist and the hero fighting over a woman. Remember, property is the basis of all human rights - so one's female property is worth fighting for! Also, it's a book about "famine" and "the grublike fat of the oppressor" - read: it's a book about extreme irony! The Soviet Union was hell, just look at the income inequality! Gawd bless America!
Not to say that the Russian revolution wasn't terrible - what do you expect from a nondemoctatic monopoly (ie a corporation)? It's just that Randy describes the whole thing in such a heartless way, as if suffering is a fashion that went out with grunge or whatever.
The first two chapters go on and on describing all sorts of nasties, which would be familiar to anyone who has suffered poverty in a non-welfare country - lice, bad smells, and horror of horrors, having to always be "fighting off these porters, husky loafers in ragged soldier's coats, who seized luggage without being asked, insolently offering their services." My God, why the hell didn't we nuke Russia the first chance we got? (Come on - they're loafers and yet, they go to work without being asked? Am I the only one who finds something odd about this statement?)
The trains are not on time - (remember that old line about fascism: "at least in Italy the trains run on schedule"?) as opposed to capitalist countries, were poor people know exactly when the train will come - never - because either they can't afford it or all of the tracks have been demolished at the behest of oil lobbiers.
The worst atrocity is the first sentence of the book: "Petrograd smelled of carbolic acid". The acid is disinfectant, provided by the government to prevent disease. But hey, it smells bad! Rational self-interest here! Quit saving lives and make this place smell better you statist monkey!
Lots of use of the word "dull". This and "bland" was the main way that communist countries were described by the mainstream media in the 1980's, when there wasn't much that could actually be blamed on them. Journalists, you owe a lot to Randy.
As for descriptions, the social Darwinist bits are the most fun. Here is our heroine going the trials of...Riding a train with poor people. "Lynda did not condescend to hide outward signs of social superiority...A jabot of tarnished gold lace...eau-de-cologne." Compare this to the socially inferior: "a bearded peasant in a smelly sheepskin coat, who scratched himself continually, a haggard woman with sagging breasts...bare-footed, uncombed children...a dissatisfied woman with a man's jacket, bad teeth..." Ah yes, the most horrible atrocity of the revolution: no segregated first-class second-class coach system. How she survived I'll never know.
Worst of all, a communist slogan is described, and "Some lines were crooked." Oh, the humanity!
And as for economic inefficiency: "There were stores without signs and signs without stores." Never mind the fact that both ad signs and stores are completely useless - they produce nothing!
Things start getting erotic around page 26: "His hands provided the ermines that swept many stairways in the royal palaces, [That means her hero works for the government! Except for Randies, 'government" only means things that help people, but armies and palaces don't count.] ...the sables that embraced many shoulders as white as marble. His muscles and the long hours of the frozen Siberian nights had paid for every hair and every fur that passed through his hands." Now you see why she writes fiction. What I don't understand is why she didn't write harlequin romances.
Oh, and if you liked the bit about shoulders as white as marble, a woman on page 15 has "her face whiter than the white pages of her book". In a "magnificent apartment" some statues have been defiled: "there were pencilled inscriptions on the white stomachs of its marble cupids." What could be worse than a little white angel being defiled? Nothing according to the KKK.
Getting bored, I opened the book at a random page and found a guy slurping on cabbage soup "with a resounding smack". Unless I need to light a campfire sometime soon, that's the worst 25 cents I've ever spent.
The anti-golden rule - early "objectivism"