By Sharanya Sridhar:
Atlas Shrugged, the book that was voted among top 2 (the other book being Fountainhead by the same author) favorites of millions of Americans, stands as one of the books that changed my life. Created by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged portrays the struggle of creators in the world against destroyers, who believe that altruism is the morality that saves the world from perishing.
Atlas Shrugged follows the life of Dagny Taggart, the Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental. It clearly depicts her struggle to keep her Transcontinental alive in the world of second handers along side her journey of finding the love of her life. How both her journeys intervene and bring an end to the story forms the basis of the plot.
Eddie Willers, Hank Rearden,Francisco D’Anconia and many more interesting characters make the book worth reading. Strong dialogues and spell binding speeches on objectivism form the backbone of Atlas Shrugged.
The style of writing is quite captivating and has the power to influence the readers to a great capacity. Although lot of my friends felt that the book was quite slow paced compared to Fountainhead. I found it the other way round. For most of the readers its difficult to get past the first 200 pages, however after crossing that milestone its hard to put down the book. My opinion differs though, I couldn’t think of dropping the book from the moment I started it. One irritating aspect of all Ayn Rand books are the extremely small fonts , probably it was her way of saving resources.
Readers who found it difficult to understand the Randian theories in Fountainhead should definitely read this one for it presents her ideas in a more practical way.
The book is being made into a movie as a Trilogy. Its still in its pre production stage. After about 3 years of considering Angelina Jolie for the role of Dagny, now due to some reason unknown to me , she has been replaced by Charlize Theron. Other cast of the movie remains undecided.
Well even though its undeniable that I am desperately waiting for the book to take a visual form . I am unsure if its possible to give a perfect form to such a legendary work. Well ‘WHO IS JOHN GALT?’
The writer is a Correspondent of Youth Ki Awaaz.