Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” is good.

Yes, it's strange to hear "Ayn Rand" and "Good" together, but what can I do, I liked this story. It was written before "Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" if anything. And this story is similar to Zamyatin's "We", >! only the ending is more positive.!<

This is a dystopia where being an individual is a terrible sin, where the pronoun "I" has been destroyed and replaced with "we", where all people live only for society, and progress has been slowed down and the most useful invetion is a candle. And also people don't have names, just nicknames and numbers.

The idea of this dystopia is interesting and quite frightening, because a place where people are machines that work until they "break down" sounds creepy.

The story tells about a guy who was different from others in height and intelligence. He was assigned to work as a sweeper, but one day he finds a place that the state does not know about and there he opens electricity.

In principle, I liked the plot. It is quite short, intense in the first half and dynamic. And the author conveyed her ideas here much better than in her magnus opus.

Here she more clearly grounded her philosophy without too much water and a bunch of pretentious monologues. And even though I still don't accept objectivism, I understand it much better now. Yes, there is a hypertrafication inherent in Rand's books, but here it is not perceived as badly as in her subsequent works.

The main character turned out to be quite good. He's an ordinary guy who wants to be something more and he has the ability to do it. You worry about him, you feel sorry for him, because I repeat, he is an ordinary guy who wanted to make people's lives better, even for his own selfish purposes.

The author's writing style seemed normal to me here. The narrative here is conducted through the diary of the hero, who speaks about himself in the plural, and about others too. It was hard to read, but the author conveyed the emotions of the hero well. You feel his joy, sadness, despair, and hope.

As a result, I liked the story. It was short, dynamic, the philosophy was much better explained, you worry about the hero and the author conveyed the emotions of his character well. There is an exaggeration inherent in this author, but hey, >! there is no scene of romanticized rape, there is no long monologue of 70 pages, generators do not explode from anyone's ideality and there are no explosions.!<