Quyển này đáng lẽ được 6 sao. Mà phải trừ bớt 1 sao vì cái kết nhảm xàm nhất trong những cái kết nhảm xàm. Kiểu như tác giả lên cơn: Trời ơi tui mệt quá rồi tui hành hạ bản thân cả nghìn trang rồi giờ tui chấm hết lẹ để tự giải thoát. Trong lúc phẫn uất cần xả hơi thì lỡ dại đọc ngôn tình, đầu óc lúc này đề kháng kém nên lỡ nhiễm, nhiễm rồi lại lỡ bê vô đứa con đang la ó đòi ra đường.
Mình đọc Suối nguồn lần đầu năm 17 tuổi, xong bỏ dở chương cuối vì lúc đó nặng đầu quá không tiếp tục được nữa. Năm ngoái mới đọc lại và đọc hết. Xong tự khen hồi xưa dốt dốt nhưng được cái may mắn, trời xui đất khiến không đọc hết, nhờ vậy mà giữ lại ấn tượng vô cùng tốt đẹp về Suối nguồn. Còn giờ, nó mãi mãi là một tiểu thuyết vĩ đại với một cái kết lười biếng.

Ayn Rand is Nietzsche for stupid people

Ever read a book that changed your life as a kid, I mean totally reconfigured your perceptions of life and how it should be lived? Yeah, me too. This was one of those books for me. It blew me away as a kid. My hero was Roark and his rugged individualism and integrity. Upon rereading this 50th anniversary hardback edition as an adult, I was appalled at this amoral tale. Roark is a sociopathic monster whose integrity is blind and callous. The Objectivism that Rand uses to undergird this story seems to find ethics of communities, or how we should act towards each other, repugnant. Every character is a simple caricature of one facet of a human, there is no moral ambiguity or ambivalence in anybody. Everybody here is an absolute, and because of that, an absolute failure. She attempts to soften these granite facades with a love story, but Rand turns out to be inept at that too. Sure Roark has impeccable aesthetic taste, but if it isn't in service to bettering your life or your fellow man's (preferably both), then it's just an exercise in solipsistic torture. And the whole manifesto masquerading as a serious novel gave me eyeball sprain from all of the rolling it did. This book is probably dangerous for naive minds and too naive for adult minds.

Заслужаваше си.

И почването, и "стратегическото изчакване" от десетина месеца.
Макар че Ранд понякога звучи студено и нелитературно, опитвайки се да пише литература, идеите ѝ са интересни, дават добър тласък за размисъл. В моя случай, сякаш дойдоха и в много точен момент, за да дадат някакъв "по-отвъден" поглед върху ситуация с някаква претенция за очевидност. Може би това подпомогна лесното дочитане на този текст. А и май точно тези книги ни остават - които са ни привлекли и проговорили в точния момент.

Чудя се дали нямаше да е по-добре да напише трактат.

Дано успея да извадя някак подчертаванията си от четеца.

I once broke up with someone because she was an ardent follower of Ayn Rand. it just started bothering me more and more, and I started seeing the taint of Objectivism in so many of her comments. mind you, this was in college when i was much more obnoxiously political.

after we broke up, she turned around and started dating my roommate... sweet revenge, and a fitting response from an Objectivist.

I had not really paid much attention to Ayn Rand, darling of the conservatives (very surprisingly, actually) until I began reading her biography. When I asked around to see who had actually read any of her work, I found only a few, but lots of opinions about Rand herself. Often those comments ascribed beliefs to Rand that were at opposite poles of the spectrum, from conservative to radical, individualist to Nazi fascist. Obviously another case of what I call the “De Toqueville syndrome,” where everyone pretends to have read a famous book and to know what the author stood for, but has no firsthand reading knowledge. Her biography revealed a complex and very interesting individual, so it was time to dig into her works personally.

The Fountainhead tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect. Thrown out of Stanton School of Architecture for his refusal to adhere to the standards of the past (the dean views Roark as a rebel who opposes all the rules of architecture and his society’s view of art that is representation of what has been revered in the past) and for turning in assignments that represented a complete break from the past. The conversation with the dean, who tried to persuade Roark to come back into the fold, represents the central theme of the book, the conflict between those who are realitycentered against those who define their lives through the eyes of other people. Roark seeks employment with Cameron, an architect whose designs tried to incorporate using the advantages of new materials, e.g., a skyscraper should look tall, not just like a twenty-story brick building trying to look like a renaissance house. Cameron began to design buildings the way he wanted rather than how his clients demanded. His business dwindled to nothing, but he was sought out by Roark.

Following Cameron’s retirement, Roark seeks employment as a draftsman in a large architectural firm, where he gets a break by sketching a house that breaks with tradition completely but is just what the client wants. Roark is a brilliant but struggling iconoclast, while his rival and former classmate Peter Keating rises to the top of his profession by using obsequiousness, manipulation, and deception. His primary concern is how he is perceived by others. He designs by copying from the past, never thinking independently. Both men are in love with Dominique Falcon, a brilliant, passionate woman, who falls in love with Roark, admires his genius, but who is convinced his genius has no chance in a corrupt world. The villain of the book is Ellsworth Toohey, an architectural critic of note, who denounces Roark for his failure to adhere to the accepted standards of the day. Toohey believes that the individual must sacrifice his independence to the will of others, i.e. society or the group. Toohey is employed by Gail Wynand, a publisher whose paper caters to the lowest common denominator to gain power. He comes to admire Roark and must then decide whether he will continue to pander to popular taste or live according to his higher standards. Rand and her novels have been vilified by the left-wing as reactionary and praised by conservatives as brilliant and influential.

Frankly, I cannot understand how conservatives can be so enamored of this work that celebrates independence and the rejection of tradition and “normal” morality. She celebrated atheism, a kind of free love, very strong women, and a rejection of parental values and social norms. She abhorred the subordination of reason to faith, of surrendering one’s own thinking to the beliefs of others. She despised the religious believer who without questioning adopts the religious beliefs of his parents, conforming without thinking. Morality becomes something practical and relative. For example, Roark dynamites a government building project that has been altered, so he can gain access to the courts since the government cannot be sued. Roark really doesn’t care what other people think. He has such strong personal will that he will just do what he thinks is right. He also pals around with one of the construction workers who admires him because he is the only architect that understands construction, and, indeed, Roark makes the point that he loves engineering and building.

That sounds more like sixties liberalism than what I hear conservatives espouse. Rand is clearly a romantic who believed that man can live up to an ideal, and reason can help them achieve the independence and the happiness that depends on that independence. What infuriates liberals, as far as I can gather, was her unfailing adherence to capitalism. I suppose conservatives latched on to her vigorous rejection of collectivism, no doubt related to her childhood experiences under Communism. This is not to say Rand celebrates nonconformity for its own sake. That is simply another form of conformity because it’s living one’s life in reaction to the standards of others. The conformist must learn the beliefs of others to adhere to them; the nonconformist must learn the standards so as to avoid adhering to them. Both groups are psychological dependents. Rand celebrates the independent thinker, the individualist who lives on his own terms. The individualist creates his own standards and adheres to them regardless of what others do or think. He has a commitment to reason and facts. Roark represents the great innovator struggling against a profoundly conservative society against the traditionalist who says, “It was never done this way, so it can’t be good.” The climax of the book is Roark’s speech to the court when he is on trial. “I wish to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. . . The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” He represents a complete rejection of altruism, “the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.”

It’s truly a shame when books and authors get labeled as “conservative” or “liberal,” “communist” or “democrat” and then judged on the basis of the label. Read the book; make up your own mind!

Είναι κακό απ' όλες τις απόψεις. Είναι κακογραμμένο, η πλοκή γεμάτη λογικά κενά και η φιλοσοφία που πρεσβεύει όχι μόνο επικίνδυνη και ηθικά χρεοκοπημένη, αλλά επίσης, έαν την κρίνει κανείς με την κοινή λογική, κατά βάση εντελώς ηλίθια.

The Fountainhead is not a great novel. Not philosophically, not literarily. The characters are unbelievable. The plot is at times entertaining but mostly boring and far-fetched, yet nauseatingly predictable. The dialogue is predominantly stilted. The vocabulary is monotonous. How many times must she use the word bromide?

There are some truths to be found: most people are made up of conglomerations of what they’ve heard from others. They let the words of others fill their heads and become their own. Original thought is rare; we frequently enshrine mediocrity; brilliance is often ignored and sometimes smashed.

The idea is that if everyone were true to their own integrity, the world would be a better place; this might be true. Many are greedy, selfish, and egotistical without an ounce of integrity. The book thinks integrity makes these undesirable qualities okay, makes people "real." Maybe it does. But this idea makes things rough for the poor bastards who were born passive, affable, or weak. And circumstances play a big part in many people’s lives, whether they are real people in Rand's eyes or not.

One can judge the quality of a book by comparing how many times it produces scoffs compared to chuckles. I chuckled a few times; I scoffed hundreds of times; I rolled my eyes by the minute. The tediousness of this prolixity is nearly unbearable. The characters seem to be motivated by something foreign to what lies at the heart of human volition. Their words and actions ring false. Their thoughts are preposterous.

Rand harps on the invalidity of touting service, sacrifice, and altruism as virtues. What about teachers? What about nurses? What about those in the food service industry: janitors, bartenders, clerks? What about soldiers? Without these “servants”, who are not really human in Rand’s view, a nation might have a bunch of “real” folks with integrity whose state could be dominated by a rival filled with servants. We’d have no decent restaurants or hospitals. We’d be a state of starving, sick people with loads of superfluous integrity and individualism living in filth.

Architecture presented as the highest art and as more important than music, the fact that Roark is the only man capable of building the buildings he builds, Roark seeing trees as merely lumber for man to transform into structures, Ellsworth Toohey’s nebulous reasons for the destruction of other men: these are just a few of the ridiculous things presented.

It is ironic that this monstrosity has been labeled and stamped by so many as a philosophical work. I can think of countless other pieces of literature, not often called philosophical, which carry so much more weight metaphysically, epistemologically, ethically, existentially, etc.

The version I read had a foreword written by Rand. In it, she mentioned Nietzsche, a philosopher she both seemed to admire and contradict. While Nietzsche’s brand of thought can be derided nearly as easily as hers, at least his writing style was inventive.

There is a speech by Toohey near the end that did strike me as something great. He condemns the average, the things humans have created that make the masses feel guilty for natural desires, and the obedient nature of most people; and it's done succinctly and eloquently, and this is Rand's voice at its most powerful. Still, even this bright spot is tarnished by the fact that the reaction by Peter Keating, no matter how much of a doormat Rand has made him, is devoid of reason and self-interest so unthinkably as to make the would-be poignant scene outlandish.

Let’s not forget that at the end of her life, Ayn Rand collected social security and relied on Medicare. This alone does not make her a hypocritical parasite, but at the very least, she was wrong.

3.5/5
"This is the way I'd like to die, stretched out on some shore like this, just close my eyes and never come back."
I didn't know what to expect from this book other than a cheesy love story that I had no interest in. The book starts off interesting with the introduction of Roark and Keating - two completely different men in the architecture industry. I lost a lot of interest towards the middle of book and found myself skimming the pages and missing the message, but it eventually picked back up for the last 100-150 pages. I don't necessarily agree with Objectivism, because it simply wouldn't work in a country like mine (USA), but it's interesting to read about this "new" philosophy.

I read the Fountainhead, the famous book by Ayn Rand that almost everyone else in the country read long ago, before me, and "LOVE love love love love loved" it, well after I should have.

The book is 800 long pages, and I labored through it for about a month, including a week haitus when I couldn't take it anymore, and finally found some chapters at the very end that captivated me enough to say I couldn't put the book down (maybe 50 pages, total).

This book is commonly accepted as wonderful, but I honestly need to call this an overrated novel. Maybe it's because I became predisposed to hating it because so many random strangers on public transit insisted on interrupting me to mention how much they love the book. Maybe it's because everyone says the exact same thing and has the exact same opinions about the book, which, ironically enough, seems to contradict what Ms. Rand so thoroughly and relentlessly promotes. Maybe it's because I don't personally have the patience for a repetitive, slow-moving soap opera with characters I can't quite care about.

This isn't to say that I don't find the writing style to be eloquent, or that I lack appreciation for the ideal presented. I think the concept of selfishness for the greater good is fascinating, as do lovers of Ayn Rand works. Anyone who has ever been made to feel inadequate would logically feel this way. I don't discredit the effort to create such a lengthy, epic tale, but I feel like most of the hours spent reading this would have been better spent elsewhere.

Suối nguồn là một cuốn sách biết cách đẩy nhân vật của mình đi đến tận cùng, tận cùng của những yêu ghét, tận cùng của lý tưởng và quan niệm. Đó là cách cuốn sách lôi cuốn được độc giả trong một cái tôi rõ ràng, khảng khái đầy khẳng định. Cái tôi được miêu tả kĩ càng qua hành động, suy nghĩ, lời nói một cách chi tiết và nhiều mặt. Nhưng cũng chính vì lẽ đó, cuốn sách mang tính biểu tượng nhiều hơn là hiện thực. Độc giả sẽ bị cuốn đi trong dòng suy nghĩ rõ ràng của tác giả, không hề hoài nghi, không hề e sợ. Với một chút lâng lâng, người đọc tự tạo nên một hình ảnh bất định về một mẫu người mới với tất cả những gì rõ ràng và không hề pha tạp.

Điều tôi hơi không thích ở tác phẩm này đó chính là việc quá thần tượng hóa Roak. Lẽ dĩ nhiên việc đó không có gì đáng phê phán. Nhưng việc thần tượng hóa Roak đã tạo nên một hình ảnh rập khuôn về mẫu người siêu anh hùng. Không, anh hùng thì không khuôn mẫu. Chẳng phải chính Roak đã luôn muốn phá vỡ những siêu anh hùng của quá khứ đó sao. Chẳng phải anh luôn muốn là một con người mới chân thực và không màu mè đó sao. Nếu là anh hùng, tất cả các nhân vật trong truyện đều có thể trở thành anh hùng chứ không phải chỉ riêng Roak. Tất nhiên họ sẽ là anh hùng ở những hình thái khác. Dominique là anh hùng trong tình yêu. Toohey là một nhà tư tưởng vĩ đại. Gail luôn là kẻ anh hùng trong việc vươn lên nắm lấy quyền lực. trong một mớ bầy hầy bẩn thỉu. Peter sẽ là một siêu anh hùng trong giới ngoại giao. Có điều, tất cả những kẻ khác ngoài Roak không bao giờ thấy thỏa mãn với việc làm một siêu anh hùng trong thế giới của họ, bằng chính những quan niệm của họ. Họ luôn xoay sở để làm một loại siêu anh hùng khác, một loại anh hùng dường như không thể chạm tới, như Roak.

Tôi tự hỏi nếu như Peter không ham muốn điều gì khác ngoài sự nổi tiếng, Toohey không tha thiết gì khác ngoài quyền nắm giữ những tâm hồn, Gail không muốn gì khác ngoài tiền bạc và quyền lực; họ, mỗi người cứ đi theo con đường của riêng mình, cho đến tận cùng thì phải chăng Roak sẽ chả là gì chứ đừng nói đến một siêu anh hùng.

This is a very useful book. My partner and I use it as a litmus test for figuring out which of our acquaintances are driven or amused by selfishness, egotism and misogyny. Since it's also over 700 pages long and quite heavy, we occassionally use it to whack each other on the head whenever the other person is bullshitting or doing something excessively stupid.

In the summer, when drinking glasses get ridiculously sweaty, I like to use this as a coaster (I daresay the water and coffee rings give it its sole shred of character). The other day, I repaired an old table with a rotting leg and propped it up to balance using this book. I can't thank Ayn Rand enough because her book has made my life so easy.