Fredrik Anvin Anvin itibaren Valletot, France itibaren Valletot, France

Profoundly affecting book... I read it when I was an impressionable youth, and found that many of my views were for some time expressed either in concert or in opposition to those therein. With a good bit of perspective now, I find that Rand makes the Objectivist case about as well as it can be made in this novel, and it's a tribute to her genius as a writer that I was briefly swayed. There is definitely some bombastic tedium toward the end of the book - which is, as I recall, well over 1000 pages long - when the author takes a speech by one of her characters as an opportunity for a massive soliloqoy explaining her philosophy to the reader - as if we were too stupid to have gotten the gist after the first 900 pages of propaganda. I must admit I skipped about 100 pages at this point, and lost nothing. In fact, if her editor had had any guts, that's what he would have insisted upon, to the benefit of everybody. With that omission, the book was only somewhat ponderous, and the ideas are expressed with such passion and intellectual vigor that I was quite willing to bear the weight.