The Barnes & Noble Review
"I live for the capital; that's a fact, isn't it? And the best I can do with this fact is to like the situation. To believe it's meaningful. Otherwise I can't believe it's meaningful to die for." Thus blusters Dorrit Weger, the narrator of Ninni Holmqvist's savagely dystopian debut novel. At the age of 50, childless and her family "scattered to the winds like a dandelion clock," Dorrit has been shuttled from her cluttered farmhouse on the coast of Sweden to a pristine research facility, which operates, as one friend puts it, like "a free-range pig farm." There, in a sprawling complex -- topped by a transparent atrium, open to the passing clouds and the drumbeat of the rain -- human beings are tested, dissected, and eventually killed, their organs donated to needy residents in the "community" outside the unit gates.
Holmqvist wrote The Unit in 2006 -- it appears in English belatedly, in a sturdy translation by Marlaine Delargy -- and although the book can be read as a study in futurism, à la William Gibson or Philip K. Dick, it is probably best understood as political allegory. Two thousand six was a monumental year in Swedish history: that fall, the long-reigning Social Democrats were swept out of power, and replaced by a right-leaning coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt. As one Swedish political scientist told the The New York Times, some felt that Stockholm had been "drifting," with the administration battered by soaring unemployment rates and the first pangs of the global recession. But few imagined how seismic the election would prove, how positively shattering its implications.
Over the past decade, Sweden, once a bastion of "moral supremacy," has tacked violently to the right, jettisoning along the way many of the vestiges of the socialist state. Pensions, healthcare, and public transportation are all now privatized, and in May 2009, the government began selling off state-owned pharmacies. Asked this year about the prospect of bailing out the Saab automotive plant in Trollhattan, an industrial city on the Göta Älv, the Swedish enterprise minister demurred. "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories," she announced. And no longer, she might have added, is the Swedish state prepared to own hospitals, schools, or banks.
Americans, raised in the tumult of the free-market system, are more or less reconciled to its strictures. We may occasionally rail against Wall Street's greed, but as a country, we trust in commoditization -- in "getting ahead," and in the self-made man. Not so for the Swedes, many of whom have greeted the arrival of the New Sweden with shock, and not a little nostalgia. In The Unit, which is staged in the near future, Holmqvist positions Dorrit as politically agnostic: "Every time the topic came up, in the media or with other people" Dorrit remembers, early on in the book, "I heaved a bored sigh."
Still, after a few months in the facility, when Dorrit finds herself bent over the limp body of a dying friend -- his liver recently removed, his heart still limping along -- she is apoplectic. "I wish I lived at the time when people still believed in the heart," she sobs. "When people still believed that the heart was the central organ, containing all the memories, emotions, capabilities, defects and other qualities that make us into specific individuals. I longed to go back to an age of ignorance, before the heart lost its status and was reduced to just one of a number of vital but replaceable organs."
"Replaceable" -- this horrific idea skitters through the pages of The Unit, like the needling fragment of a nightmare. Dorrit and her compatriots at the facility are viewed by the government as throwaways; because they are childless, and because no one depends on them, they have been pressed into service for the state. Most are creative types, artists and writers and designers who came to believe it was "a taboo to be, or even dream of being, emotionally or financially dependent on anyone, or to harbor even the tiniest secret desire to live in a symbiotic relationship with another person." For this independence, they have been rewarded, upon reaching late middle age -- 50 for women, 60 for men -- with a sentence of death. And not just execution but a slow, excruciating passing, where the body is poked and prodded and sliced apart over a multi-year period before it is finally consigned, without much fanfare, to the morgue.
"I suppose I used to believe my life belonged to me," Dorrit tells her psychologist at the Unit. "Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on. But I've changed my mind. I don't own my life at all. It's other people who own it." Urged on by the shrink, she continues: "Life is…a capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy." She is only a "steward, taking care of my vital organs." This, Dorrit understands, constitutes her own biggest failure: successful human beings live for money and power. But she has lived only for herself. Now her body, so useless in life, will become in death a contribution to the progress of the state.
Holmqvist is remarkably deft at conveying the stages of self-mourning each patient experiences -- the initial shock, the passivity, the final burst of anger and disbelief -- despite a prose style that often verges on the desultory. (Dorrit: "Then I spread butter on a cracker, sliced some Port Salut and placed it on top. Ate -- still standing, but leaning against the counter facing the room. Chewed. The hard cracker crunching between my teeth… Then I remembered I had some tomatoes," etc., etc.) She doesn't waste more than a few lines on how the Unit came into existence -- something about a "debate," a "referendum" -- and once Dorrit is ensconced within the facility, the outside world flickers away. As in Kafka and Nabokov, this prison is made all the more frightening because it has no real history of its own; it is enough that it exists, and that there are people inside -- sweating, crying, dying.
A series of surprising developments do eventually provide Dorrit a modicum of hope, but they arrive late enough in the text that it would be a disservice to the reader to list them here. It is enough, I think, to say that Holmqvist, who puts no stock in modern politics, has plenty of faith in humanity. Under the white-washed eaves of the Unit, patients are encouraged to interact freely with one another: to swim in the pool; to lounge in a replicate of Monet's garden; to attend dances and gallery openings. It's only a Petri dish culture, of course, but it does much to dull the ache. Dorrit reconnects with a childhood friend, Elsa, and together, they whittle away the hours with remembrances. "This sort of talk," Dorrit thinks, "was calming, soothing. It was as if we were wrapped in a kind of cotton wool, insulating us from everything around us." Even in the thickest of darkness, Holmqvist hints, we are connected to one another by ephemeral threads.
It's no coincidence that the other great theme of The Unit is the power of witnessing -- of the petit immortality of the written word. Dorrit was a writer before coming to the facility, and ostensibly a pretty successful one; so too was Johannes, the man who eventually becomes her lover. Even as the rest of the Unit caves in around them, they sustain themselves through the act of documentation. They sleep together, and eat together, and edit one another -- Dorrit finishes a novel, among other writings, and Johannes, a collection of stories. Holmqvist clearly views these acts as sacred; they are paramount even to life itself -- a corrective to the rigidly capitalist state. Even The Unit itself is revealed, in its later pages, to be a kind of record of the facility for the people living outside its walls. As Johannes tells Dorrit, "Man is a collector, a fanatic when it comes to documentation. The only thing of real value is what we produce." --Matthew Shaer
Matthew Shaer is a contributor to the Barnes & Noble Review.
From Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
A taut, surreal debut novel from Sweden, The Unit is a surprising celebration of love and life in the face of certain death. Dorrit Weger is a writer who has just turned 50. In middle age, without children, great professional success, or work in a necessary industry, she's considered "dispensable" and taken to live at the Second Reserve Unit for Biological Material. There she is expected to act as a human guinea pig, undergoing increasingly risky scientific experiments and donating her organs to "needed" members of society, until she makes her "final donation." But the world she enters is also a retreat from a world that has rejected those on the margins of society. In the "luxury slaughterhouse," Dorrit becomes part of a caring group of friends and even falls in love, causing her life to take an unexpected turn.
With a voice reminiscent of such disparate masters as Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury, Holmqvist has created a fascinating portrait of a stark society that cares only for its most productive members. The Unit explores how far society can go to shun those unwilling to conform, and how those exiled can create their own community of love and caring, even under the darkest of circumstances.
(Fall 2009 Selection)
From the Publisher
One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation. Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and…well, then what?
THE UNIT is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care.
Publishers Weekly
Swedish author Holmqvist's unconvincing debut, part of a wave of dystopias hitting this summer, is set in a near future where men and women deemed "dispensable"-those unattached, childless, employed in nonessential professions-are checked into reserve bank units for biological material and become organ donors and subjects of pharmaceutical and psychological experiments. When Dorrit Weger, who has lived her adult life isolated and on the brink of poverty, is admitted to the unit, she finds, to her surprise, comfort, friendship and love. Though the residents are under constant surveillance, their accommodations are luxurious, and in their shared plight they develop an intimacy rarely enjoyed in the outside world. But an unlikely development forces Dorrit to confront unexpected choices. Unfortunately, Holmqvist fails to fully sell the future she posits, and Dorrit's underdeveloped voice doesn't do much to convey the direness of her situation. Holmqvist's exploration of female desire, human need and the purpose of life has its moments, but the novel suffers in comparison with similar novels such as The Handmaid's Tale and Never Let Me Go. (June)
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Kirkus Reviews
Pricey shops that require no money. Gardens that trump Monet's. Creature comforts galore. But Swedish ace Holmqvist's English-language debut soon discloses a catch. The shelf-life for inhabitants of this paradise is about six years. This is the Second Reserve Bank Unit, into which the State herds women 50 and up, and men 60 and over, to use for biological material. They're fattened like calves, but there's civic-duty payback: mandatory organ donation, culminating in the final "gift" of their lungs and hearts. Big Brother doesn't take every oldster, just those termed "dispensables": the cash-strapped, underachieving or, worst of all, childless. Dorrit Weger, freelance writer, dog-lover and free sprit, is initially mesmerized by her new surroundings. She feels a sense of community, a closeness never offered by Nils, the inadequate lover who would never leave his wife. And she takes pride in being needed when she's enlisted in one of the Unit's many medical experiments. It's a benign investigation into the effects of exercise, but in the cafeteria and on the lush grounds Dorrit soon notices other campers sleepwalking like zombies or displaying weirdly blotched skin. As her roommates are ushered off one by one to their final donations, she panics into the arms of Johannes, a fellow Unit resident who actually manages to impregnate her. Dazzled by upcoming motherhood, Dorrit is certain her bulging belly will gain her freedom. Proven at last productive, she's bound to be rewarded by the State . . . .isn't she? In her first novel, short-story writer Holmqvist echoes political-science treatises like Hobbes' Leviathan and Rousseau's The Social Contract (gone decidedly mad here), as well as theusual dystopian novels from Brave New World to 1984. Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax-creepily profound and most provocative. Agent: Magdelena Hedlund/Norstedts Agency
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