The Unit

Dystopian literature is not my usual thing. In fact, I generally put any and all dystopian novels gingerly back on the shelf at the bookstore no matter how appealing the cover or title is or how many recommendations I hear. Perhaps I am just practicing head in the sand avoidance, not wanting to think about how our current society could easily devolve into a society like the ones portrayed by imaginative authors in these often very disturbing worlds. So you'll know just how much I was looking forward to reading this particular book. And I wouldn't have read it had I not been given it to read for a committee on which I served.

But the committee obigated me to give it a fair shake (even if I waited almost to the end of my reading list for show more them to pick it up, choosing to read books I thought I'd enjoy more first). And I won't make you wait until the end of the review to tell you that I am incredibly grateful that this came across my desk as it did, obligating me to read this powerful, amazing, and completely worthwhile novel. It stretched my assumptions and gripped my attention. It was indeed a "Wow!" reading experience that left me thinking about it for a good long time afterwards.

Dorrit Weger is turning fifty. What this means for a childless unmarried writer is that she will have no option but to move into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. In short, the state will now feed, clothe, and entertain her. They will keep her healthy. The price for this? She must be willing to donate body parts and participate in scientific studies that benefit the "productive" members of society. There will come a time when she is asked to make a "final donation," one that costs her her life. And she has no choice but to comply with this directive no matter how horrifying it seems to her.

Once the initial disgust has worn off though, Dorrit settles into the Unit, making friends, volunteering for non-invasive studies, and even falling in love. The subtle horror of her fellow inmates being farmed for organs never quite leaves though, running through even the mundanity of daily life. People disappear with or without warning to make their final donations. Scientific studies go wrong and the subjects are left permanently damaged (but only for a brief time as they almost immediately then make their final donation).

But if the manufactured idyllic life in the Unit is a facade, the human relationships and connections between the characters are strong and real. And it is in creating these characters who struggle and philosophize and love and challenge despite their certain fate that Holmqvist has excelled. The society these characters must exist within does force the reader to examine some of the questions in our own society. Who is a productive member of society? Who makes that determination? Should we acquiese without question for the greater good of the whole? What kind of society are we creating? And what do we value above all?

The twist of fate whereby Dorrit has the means to save herself is masterful. And the path that she ultimately chooses doesn't really answer the questions that the story raises. But I don't think we're meant to find answers. We are meant to reflect on the questions. And I certainly did that. It was hard to start another book after this one because it went on percolating in my brain for so long. Not one I would ever have read on my own, I can't really explain why I think everyone should read it. But everyone should. Riveting, troubling, exquisite, and addictive, this is a book that challenges and rewards. It is simply put, a must read.

Thanks to the Other Press for sending me a copy to review even if I initially wrinkled my nose. Teach me to prejudge a book! show less

In a world that worships youth, children and productivity, this book is on target. The subject matter is different from Never Let Me Go - The only similarity is that humans are used for parts. As an over-fifty woman with no children and great love for my pets, I identified heavily with Dorrit. She expressed many things that I've felt about society and my role in it. We women over 50 become invisible unless we yell and scream. But when we yell and scream, we're told that it is inappropriate and desperate. Our lack of youth and lack of children invalidates us and breaks our will.

It's unsurprising that I found myself sobbing many times during the story. Heck, I'm crying now.

In a world that worships youth, children and productivity, this book is on target. The subject matter is different from Never Let Me Go - The only similarity is that humans are used for parts. As an over-fifty woman with no children and great love for my pets, I identified heavily with Dorrit. She expressed many things that I've felt about society and my role in it. We women over 50 become invisible unless we yell and scream. But when we yell and scream, we're told that it is inappropriate and desperate. Our lack of youth and lack of children invalidates us and breaks our will.

It's unsurprising that I found myself sobbing many times during the story. Heck, I'm crying now.

Review originally published on my blog, Musings of a Bookish Kitty:
http://www.literaryfeline.com/2016/12/bookish-thoughts-unit-by-ninni-holmqvist.h...


The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy
Other Press, 2009
Fiction; 268 pgs
Source: Postal Mail Group (Borrowed)

As Holmqvist describes it in her novel, The Unit, it started as a debate by a new political party that wasn't taken too seriously. Overtime, however, the idea grew, taking on new forms and growing in popularity. Soon, it became a way of life. Men over sixty and women over fifty who were single, childless, and without jobs valued by society as contributing to the greater good are now considered dispensable and forced to give their bodies up for science. Sequestered show more in one location, they seemingly live out their final years in comfort--their every need met. There is a beautiful garden right out of a Monet painting, walkways, and shops, restaurants, and a theater. It's an indoor heaven, of sorts. Or so they want you to believe. Their every move and word is monitored. The dispensable people's purpose now is to take part in various psychological and scientific studies--and donate organs as needed.

Set in a Dystopian Sweden, The Unit asks the question what, if any, is the value of life? Who decides? Dorrit Weger has just turned 50, and reluctantly settles into life on the unit. As the novel progresses, she reflects on her life and what has led her to her this place. Growing up, she was taught to be self-reliant and to go after her dreams. She chose to write, and lived sparsely but comfortably with her beloved dog Jock. It was easy to identify with Dorrit and understand why she made the life choices she did. How was she to know the political winds would change so drastically over the course of her lifetime, earning her the label of a dispensable person? It is not something she agrees with, but has little choice other than to accept it.

Holmqvist does a great job of capturing the range of emotions and thoughts Dorrit goes through over the course of the novel. She is angry and sad, resigned, and scared. There are also moments of happiness and hope. We see the connections Dorrit makes with her friends who are in the same situations, and we go through the grief process as we have to say goodbye when they make their "final donations." The people who run the unit try to make the process as humane as possible, and yet, there is nothing humane about it. It's disturbing how easily accepted all of this is. And yet, is it all that surprising? I thought it was very telling when Dorrit is told she can know the person who is receiving organs, but the person receiving them is not told anything about the donor. Do this to save an important person's life! But obviously the donor isn't important enough to be recognized. It's a form of manipulation, to make it easier for those dispensables who have to give up their lives. There's something terribly wrong with that, as if the situation wasn't terrible enough as it was.

The Unit is more of a quiet book without any big plot twists or major climatic moments. However, it is very thought provoking. Dorrit's story is a compelling one that was hard to put down. I wanted so much for life to be different for the people deemed dispensable. I had never heard of this book before it arrived in the mail as one of my postal mail book group reads. I am glad it came my way. show less

In this near future society, certain women over 50 and men over 60, who are deemed “unnecessary” by society, check in to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material where they are promised a comfortable life in a state-of-the-art facility but will be expected to participate in medical and psychological testing, and eventually donate their organs to benefit others, those deemed necessary to society. People have accepted the ethos behind this practice and understand that they are making an important sacrifice.

Holmqvist presents the story of Dorrit Weger, single, childless and not employed in an essential field (and therefore deemed “unnecessary”), as she moves into her comfortable, new apartment within the unit. She show more quickly makes friends and seems to enjoy a pleasurable life. She being treated well, she tells an employee of the unit, “If you compare it with the way we’re treated out in the community. In here I can be myself, on every level, completely openly, without being rejected or mocked, without the risk of not being taken seriously. I am not regarded as odd or as some kind of alien or some troublesome fifth wheel that people don’t know what to do with. Here I’m like everybody else. I fit in. I count… I have a dignified life here. I am respected.”

This is a creepy and sobering look at the ethos of a near future society which seeks only results, and thus values only the essential. Dorit tells her own story, calmly and with an unnerving resignation, and the reader is lulled by it; that is, until something happens that will threaten her resignation and make her rethink her decision. Thought-provoking and absorbing, and with a somewhat surprising ending, The Unit provides an interesting mirror for us to peer into. show less

This nasty little novel successfully gave me the heebie-jeebies. I hesitate to say I enjoyed it (it's too unpleasant for that), but it was well-executed and compelling reading.

Easily dismissed as 'Never Let Me Go' with old people, it deserves more consideration. However: trigger warnings a-go-go. This is jam-packed with topics that will make it unsuitable for many readers, from every -ism through to an implicit pro-life subtext (although it could be argued that the book is set up to invite you to reject this, as it is a part of a system that is clearly inhuman, none of the characters do so overtly) and the most confused feminism I've come across for a while.

In an indeterminate future, Sweden has a democratically elected government and show more has enacted statutes that relegate the 'dispensable' (broadly defined as the childless and/or unmarried who exceed child-bearing age and are not fulfilling a 'needed' social role such as teachers, nurses and role models) to biological reserve banks (or luxury slaughterhouses, as one inmate calls them) to be used for medical experiments and donor organs / tissue.

The protagonist - a 50-year-old woman named Dorrit - is fit and independent, but without a husband or children to keep her in society, she is sent to a Unit - fully aware of what this will mean. Life expectancy in a Unit is at best 3-5 years.

The novel begins with her introduction to the unit and an exploration of how staff and inmates collude to create an environment which is peaceful, inviting and even addictive. Dorrit makes the point that it is the first time she has been part of a community, rather than socially excluded for choosing to be a 'less productive' member of society - an unmarried childless author, allowing us to see how Swedish society is hardening in the wake of the new policies. It continues with her life within the unit, the coping mechanisms the population adopt, the ethical struggles of the staff, and the inevitable tragedies of love and death.

Dorrit is an interesting bundle of contradictions - independent, strong, intellectual, raised to fear commitment as a trap, but oddly compliant with her untenable situation. She makes no efforts to avoid her fate (leave the country? Ask Nils for a baby rather than a wedding ring?) and she secretly longs for a traditional gender role in a Sweden that has made flirtation, stay-at-home mothers and disrespect illegal. Gender equality is a blanket hiding a ruthless attempt to create an optimally productive population (as Dorrit herself reflects, comforting herself that she contributes through her death) 'for the greater good'. Ironically, this is described as both democratic and capitalist - even if it sounds more like something out of a Stalinist nightmare.

Dorrit is not politically engaged and does not stop to think hard about the broader implications of the policy and the social engineering that sits around it (consider dispensability through the lens of gender roles, family units, abortions, homosexuality, infertility, disability, etc and feel the chill), just as - by the end of the novel - it is clear that the policy's authors have not thought things through. If your future depends on being needed, and need is defined by procreation, Sweden quite predictably experiences a population explosion, putting even more pressure on the dwindling Units to keep the growing population healthy. By the end of the novel, the definition of dispensable is broadening, and the spectre of wholesale slaughter based on almost any variable is terrifying the previously compliant population.

The warning here is to remain politically engaged - Sweden sleepwalks into its nightmare because people don't consider the full ramifications of the statutes. Dorrit, young and independent, doesn't vote against it - it doesn't occur to her that while she is disinterested in marriage or children at 20-something, she will be condemned to death at 50. We must do better than only worry about that which affects us directly. show less

If you don’t have children, if you choose to follow your dream instead of choosing compromise or security or “normality” (read: heterosexuality), what is your life worth? Not much, in this futuristic Scandinavian society. You are designed a “dispensable,” which means you are locked away to have your body available for testing and organ harvesting on behalf of those who contribute more usefully to the nation’s prosperity.

The facility to which you are taken is a plush one, designed to quash all thoughts of noncompliance. Everything is free, including delicious food and new clothes; there are lovely garden walkways and top-of-the-line sports facilities, and crafts and dancing and movies and even a library. For the women over show more 50 and men over 60 delivered to the institution each month, it seems ideal….until, of course, your pancreas or lungs or heart is needed for someone else.

Dorrit Weger, a would-be writer, is sad when she first arrives at the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material. She misses her dog Jock terribly, but soon warms up to her new friends and even acquires a new love interest. Likewise, she adapts quickly to the omnipresent surveillance – there are cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny – and after a short while she forgets they are there. She spends her early days in the facility undergoing tests, swimming, visiting the theater, and going to the library.

Kjell, who volunteers in the library, points out to Dorrit that the library is quite busy:

"‘…it’s because there are so many intellectuals here. People who read books.’

‘I see,’ I said…’

‘People who read books,’ he went on, ‘tend to be dispensable. Extremely.’”

Dorrit has spent her life resisting dependency on others and following her youthful dream of writing. Paradoxically, she buys into the gender stereotypes with no equivocation:

"I think it’s beautiful when men show their physical strength openly without being ashamed of it or apologizing. And I think it’s beautiful when women dare to be physically weak and accept help with heavy jobs. I believe there’s a kind of courage in that, and courage is beautiful.”

In spite of her seeming conformity however, she harbors a rebellious streak, and wrestles with how far she wants to go to change her fate, even if she could. Interestingly, there are indications that some staff members, who are free to come and go, are outraged over the fate of the “dispensables” and would join a revolt if one were started. The “dispensables,” however, who have gone their whole adult lives without the reinforcement of nuclear family groupings, now find they live in a close-knit, supportive environment. Is it worth giving up? Should it be given up? Are children the only reason for living, or is love – whether for someone of the same sex or even for a pet - in and of itself enough? Should justification for life be needed even on a planet with scarce resources?

These are questions we might find ourselves actually considering someday. In some ways, with the allocation of health care that favors those with personal resources, we already have been addressing these issues, albeit without articulating them.

Evaluation: This is a thought-provoking novel that will make you think twice about a whole host of issues, and is a natural for book club discussions. show less