Early Review: The Unit
Here we go again, back to the old LibraryThing early review backlog!
Today's as-always-delinquent selection is Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel, the dystopian The Unit, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published in translation in June of 2009. I have reprinted my review below for the benefit of those who may be interested.
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Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel The Unit is a good book that could be a great book, a work that raises a number of interesting questions about the kinds of things we take for granted. But it is a novel about identity that leaves the reader to question more about the narrator's identity than we probably should. It starts strong, builds an intriguing premise, but falls sadly flat at the end.
The novel's protagonist is fifty-year-old Dorrit Weger, a spouse-less, childless woman whose age has caused her to be moved to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Her dystopic near-future Sweden demands that all "dispensable" members of society move to these units and undergo mandatory scientific testing and organ donation, for the benefit of those "indispensable" people (namely parents and important job-holders) out in the community. As time progresses, the sheen of the unit's easygoing, carefree life wears off and Dorrit finds herself suddenly needing to make a very difficult choice.
The fact that the novel is narrated in the first-person gives us an excellent insight into Dorrit, whose acceptance of her new life is very subtly interposed with her understanding that not everything is like it seems in the unit. Granted, those with a wide breadth of experience in dystopian literature will find little innovative in what Holmqvist says, the surprise is perhaps that the unit is fairly transparently nefarious. So we see this all through Dorrit's eyes, eyes that are much less transparent as the novel progresses.
Sadly, Dorrit's supporting cast is far less intriguing than Dorrit herself. The most significant secondary characters are Johannes, the older man with whom Dorrit finds love in the unit, and Alice, whose significant battery of tests and donations makes her the benchmark of how one's life in the unit becomes increasingly more uncomfortable. Other characters serve to help build the notion that the unit is a caring, accepting community, but the conversations Dorrit has with her fellow dispensables are far less intriguing and insightful than they probably ought to be.
Despite this issue, the novel is thematically very strong. Holmqvist does a nice (if a touch obvious) job of weaving threads of feminine identity into the the proceedings, particularly the ways in which dispensable females are missing the experience of being a mother. Motherhood is a critical facet of the novel, particularly in the later stages, and the commentary Holmqvist offers through her mouthpiece Dorrit on aging and gender are extremely fascinating and worth considering--especially in light of contemporary debates on healthcare reform and the impending failure of social security.
But where the novel trips up is in its resolution. Without divulging too much, Dorrit's choices in the final two parts of the novel don't seem to be motivated by anything identifiable in the early parts. Two moments in particular are baffling: the point at which she admits, without provocation, that two key plots points are actually fabrications; and the final chapter, which almost completely undoes most of Part 3. It's hard to decipher what Holmqvist was trying to do here, but the sudden unreliability of the narrator undoes a great deal of the work she'd accomplished in the rest of the text. Rather than leave the reader intrigued, the ending leaves him scratching his head wondering what exactly has happened and why.
Though the novel's execution is far less crisp in the end than it is at the beginning, The Unit is nevertheless an engaging and thought-provoking work. It is very readable and reasonably paced for the most part, proving that Holmqvist is a very capable writer whose talent just needs a little bit of tweaking. If nothing else, The Unit serves as evidence that she is an author whose future work will likely be well worth waiting for.
Today's as-always-delinquent selection is Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel, the dystopian The Unit, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published in translation in June of 2009. I have reprinted my review below for the benefit of those who may be interested.
------------------------
Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel The Unit is a good book that could be a great book, a work that raises a number of interesting questions about the kinds of things we take for granted. But it is a novel about identity that leaves the reader to question more about the narrator's identity than we probably should. It starts strong, builds an intriguing premise, but falls sadly flat at the end.
The novel's protagonist is fifty-year-old Dorrit Weger, a spouse-less, childless woman whose age has caused her to be moved to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Her dystopic near-future Sweden demands that all "dispensable" members of society move to these units and undergo mandatory scientific testing and organ donation, for the benefit of those "indispensable" people (namely parents and important job-holders) out in the community. As time progresses, the sheen of the unit's easygoing, carefree life wears off and Dorrit finds herself suddenly needing to make a very difficult choice.
The fact that the novel is narrated in the first-person gives us an excellent insight into Dorrit, whose acceptance of her new life is very subtly interposed with her understanding that not everything is like it seems in the unit. Granted, those with a wide breadth of experience in dystopian literature will find little innovative in what Holmqvist says, the surprise is perhaps that the unit is fairly transparently nefarious. So we see this all through Dorrit's eyes, eyes that are much less transparent as the novel progresses.
Sadly, Dorrit's supporting cast is far less intriguing than Dorrit herself. The most significant secondary characters are Johannes, the older man with whom Dorrit finds love in the unit, and Alice, whose significant battery of tests and donations makes her the benchmark of how one's life in the unit becomes increasingly more uncomfortable. Other characters serve to help build the notion that the unit is a caring, accepting community, but the conversations Dorrit has with her fellow dispensables are far less intriguing and insightful than they probably ought to be.
Despite this issue, the novel is thematically very strong. Holmqvist does a nice (if a touch obvious) job of weaving threads of feminine identity into the the proceedings, particularly the ways in which dispensable females are missing the experience of being a mother. Motherhood is a critical facet of the novel, particularly in the later stages, and the commentary Holmqvist offers through her mouthpiece Dorrit on aging and gender are extremely fascinating and worth considering--especially in light of contemporary debates on healthcare reform and the impending failure of social security.
But where the novel trips up is in its resolution. Without divulging too much, Dorrit's choices in the final two parts of the novel don't seem to be motivated by anything identifiable in the early parts. Two moments in particular are baffling: the point at which she admits, without provocation, that two key plots points are actually fabrications; and the final chapter, which almost completely undoes most of Part 3. It's hard to decipher what Holmqvist was trying to do here, but the sudden unreliability of the narrator undoes a great deal of the work she'd accomplished in the rest of the text. Rather than leave the reader intrigued, the ending leaves him scratching his head wondering what exactly has happened and why.
Though the novel's execution is far less crisp in the end than it is at the beginning, The Unit is nevertheless an engaging and thought-provoking work. It is very readable and reasonably paced for the most part, proving that Holmqvist is a very capable writer whose talent just needs a little bit of tweaking. If nothing else, The Unit serves as evidence that she is an author whose future work will likely be well worth waiting for.
posted by Dave at 8/10/2009 01:13:00 PM
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