I went to Peru for nine days near the end of March and brought with me three books. I only read one, but I didn't even manage to finish that. I was definitely optimistic in terms of free time or at least empty time when, instead, most of my trip was taken up with being sick or working myself ridiculously hard.
Nevertheless, I did finally manage to finish a book this week: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy. (I love good translators. While I couldn't read the original Swedish and so I can't say for certain how good of a job Ms. Delargy did, I completely forgot it was translated until the very end when I looked over the first few pages.
My mom recommended this book to me after reading my earlier entry on Unwind; she herself hasn't read The Unit yet, but it was recommended to her at an earlier date and she remembered it. I was more than happy to continue in the thread of dystopias examining the issue of the human body and, boy, I was not disappointed.
The Unit reminded me most strongly of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, as both look at a theme of what happens when the state decides our bodies aren't necessarily ours for one reason or another. In Atwood's tale, women are assigned roles in society based on their ability to conceive; Holmqvist targets both men and women in her novel, creating the label of 'dispensable,' which applies to any woman over the age of fifty and any man over the age of sixty-five who have no children and are not exceptionally successful in their career. Once a person is marked as dispensable, they are shipped off to a unit where they live communally with other dispensables and are routinely used in humane experiments and, eventually, for organ donation.
While Atwood focuses, then, on women's bodies being taken away from them, Holmqvist is able to examine a wider angle, despite her protagonist being a woman. In this world, it is not gender that sets the wanted apart from the useless: it is age and ability. Types of work are categorized: most of the dispensables, it's noted, are creative sorts who, yes, might have written a marvelous novel or painted a fantastic work of art, but they are not contributing to society in any directly calculable way and, so, can be set aside.
It was the mood of Holmqvist's novel that struck me the most, especially in connection to Atwood and Neal Shusterman's Unwind. Both Atwood and Shusterman filled their novels with the quick pace of fugitives or people actively working to get out of their situation. Holmqvist's protagonist, though, spends most of the novel simply floats through her situation, accepting what's given her. I don't mean to imply that the novel loses any sense of motion or that it drags: instead, the soothing nature of the unit, meant to lull its inhabitants into a sense of compliance, even works on the reader. It's easy to fall into the same traps as the characters and start to become convinced that the scenario presented in Holmqvist's dystopia really is the ideal. Atwood and Shusterman never quite reached that level of meta influence, for better or for worse.
Despite the echos of other novels found in Holmqvist's The Unit, it also stands triumphantly alone with the curious twists on familiar themes that she provides. There's little doubt in my mind that future authors will continue to play along these ideas of body and ownership, but it's also intriguing to even have this small sample of interconnected works. Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985 and Holmqvist's novel came out in 2009. What changes to the mythos will be seen in another twenty-five years?
aww this book looks interesting
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