Set in the not specified future on a (I assume) different planet, this books reads very much like a classic dystopian novel in the style of Ray Bradbury or George Orwell. My thoughts are all over the place for this one, so here they are first in list format and then a bit more elaborated. Seriously weird, but oddly fascinating, but with an ending I found unsatisfying. Which is perhaps the most unsettling thing of all.īlog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube It's not actually easy to tell whether this world is better or worse than the alternatives.
I suppose this is a critique of the kind of extreme socialism that cannot end well.
My takeaway was that when we are all reduced to the same, treated the same, as one part of a whole, we become little more than atoms. What emerges is an examination of a society of complete social equality, of communal living and strict adherence to rules that benefit the group as a whole, sometimes at the expense of the individual. The cold emptiness of this world is given moments of warmth by the burgeoning relationship between Vanja and Nina. As Vanja digs a little deeper, she notes the barrenness of the library of texts missing their ending. The importance of language and naming things is a central theme, with all objects requiring labelling in order to maintain the very fabric of reality. Straight away, there's this feeling behind everything that something is not quite right. Vanja is assigned a household through a lottery, which is where she meets Nina, as well as two other housemates called Ivar and Ulla.
The story opens on a train, with government worker Vanja travelling to the colony of Amatka to do some consumer research on hygiene products. On the back of the Vintage paperback, Matt Bell praises the author's imagination as being "fiercely strange", which I think is a fitting description of the whole book. I found it an extremely atmospheric novel- the greyness, the loneliness, the constant sense of wrongness about everything. Pair this with the ambiguous ending and I can easily see why some readers might feel dissatisfied. It's a quiet, odd, unsettling dystopian novel - my first from Swedish author Karin Tidbeck - that opens up more questions than it answers. So I thought this was excellent but I'm not sure how widely I'd recommend it.
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