A Common Reader » swedish fiction

Review: The Unit – Ninni Holmqvist

Tom — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:39:03 +0000

I have been a great fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books ever since The Remains of the Day right up to his latest book of four stories, Nocturnes. One of his more intriguing books was Never Let Me Go, about a boarding school in which cloned children were raised to become organ donors (turned into a rather good film by Director, Mark Romanek).

I was drawn to read The Unit because I was intrigued to see what Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist would make of the organ donation theme. After all, Sweden has an unpleasant history of eugenics having sterilised more mentally ill and deviant people than even Nazi Germany, in a programme that was brought to an end in 1975.

I have to say, I thought The Unit was rather good. It is unlike Never Let Me Go in many ways, not least that in the Ishiguro book it is children who donate their organs while in The Unit it is the older generation who contribute their bits and pieces for the good of others.

The Unit takes place at an unspecified time in the future. The world looks similar to ours but society has moved on. The population is shrinking and priority is given to those who can bear children. Childless, single or gay people are classified as “dispensable” and at the age of 50 for women or 60 for men (men produce viable sperm for longer than women produce viable eggs) they give up their homes and every aspect of their lives and go to live in The Unit where they spend the rest of their days – a place which has all the features of a luxury spa hotel, while going through a series of medical experiments and organ donations which will eventually kill them (via their “final donation”).

It is the matter of fact way in which this happens which shows how far this society has travelled. There is no protest on the part of the donors – they accept that this is how things are, and while they lament the loss of their previous lives, they seem content with their lot, forming a mutually supportive society to help them get through their final two to four years (nobody last longer than this).

The book opens with Dorrit, a single 50 year old woman waiting outside her house to be picked up by a dark window’d four wheel drive to be taken away to the Second Reserve Bank. She has had a hard time of it lately. Her lover won’t leave his wife for her, commissions for her free-lance writing have dried up, and she can’t afford to maintain her house. There is nothing left for her other than to respond to the letter that arrived a few weeks ago telling her to tidy up her life as best she can and prepare for her final journey to The Unit. She has nobody to say goodbye to other than neighbours and she has arranged for her much loved dog “Jock” to go and live with a family who promise to look after him. A poignant moment indeed!

I couldn’t reach the outside from now on, not by mail, e-mail, text messages or telephone calls. From now on the telephone existed for me only in the form of a fixed internal line, and as for the Internet, I was allowed to surf only under supervision, which meant an orderly or another member of staff sitting beside me, and I was not allowed to join chat forums, contribute to blogs, create or respond to advertisements, or vote in opinion polls.

She finds The Unit to be a sort of glorified Holiday Inn. There are gymnasiums and swimming pools, pleasant atrium café areas, walks in quiet gardens set under an artificial roof which mirrors the changing seasons by clever lighting. There is a better social life than most of the dispensables experienced in the outside world and every facility is provided for their amusement – from art galleries and libraries to theatres and massage clinics.

Dorrit soon makes close friends but of course, these people have a habit of disappearing for a couple of days while they donate a kidney or a cornea, returning just a little diminished in some way, but somehow taking it all in their stride for after all this is a well understood destiny to which they have been conditions for many years.

Dorrit takes part in medical experiments herself, finding these exhausting, but at least filling her days and giving her a sense of purpose. She returns to her room to write her novel, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras located in every part of her apartment, even the bathroom.

The book raises many questions, perhaps the most significant one being what happens when a dispensable become non-dispensable by meeting and falling in love with another dispensable and forming a viable unit of their own. The result is not good although Dorrit seems to find some sort of satisfaction in the outcome.

I though this book was rather good. OK, so it seems similar in some ways to Never Let Me Go, but I don’t actually believe that Ninni Holmqvist meant it this way. The Unit has all the hallmarks of wholly original thinking and I’d rather see it as an independent take on the dystopian society genre of books which describe a world of “repressive social control systems and various forms of active and passive coercion” (Wikipedia).

Its a compelling read that kept me turning the pages (well, pressing the next button on my Kindle) and I’d overall I’d score it

7/10 – well written, good story, many good ideas, entertaining in a rather gruesome sort of way

Review: Shadow – Karin Alvtegen

Tom — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:28:27 +0000

Discovering Scandinavian crime novels can be quite an eye-opener, once you get past Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. There are just so many fine writers out there whose complex plotting and characterisation is the equal of any of more well-known English-speaking authors.

Shadow, by Karin Alvtegen is an example of a book that only a few years ago would have been lost to English speakers, but one good thing about the “Dragon Tattoo” thing is that publishers seem to be queuing up to support translations of other Scandinavians and put them on our shelves and e-readers.

It is very difficult to classify this book. It is not really a “crime novel”, although a serious crime is disclosed (but not until towards the end of the book). Its not a family saga either, although the story spans four generations of a family. Neither is it a thriller, for its story is low-key and almost rambling at times. The plotting is complex and draws the reader through many layers of unravelling until it all comes together in the last chapters. From the reviewers point of view its almost impossible to describe without spoiling it (but read on, I won’t do that).

There is a strong literary theme to this book. It centres around the life and work of fictional Nobel Prize winner Axel Ragnerfelt, not in his old age and paralysed after a serious stroke, so that he can only communicate by moving the little finger of one hand. The Nobel prize has been given because of Ragnerfelt’s message of eternal human values which pervades his work, and this is so unique that his son Jan Erik has made a career out of developing a charitable foundation in his father’s name and travelling around the globe delivering inspirational talks which spread a message of tolerance and hope.

But slowly we find that all is not quite as it seems. The Rangernfelt’s long-serving house-keeper dies without relatives or friends and a representative of the public trustee is sent to tidy up her affairs. A will is found bequeathing her estate to Kristoffer Sandeblom a man nobody has heard of, a struggling play-wright, who life has run in parallel to Jan Eriks, but without the success.

Karin Alvtegen draws her readers into the connections between all these people, her story moving back and forth from Axel’s life and Jan Erik’s as we learn that all is not quite as it seems. Drama increases throughout until at the end of the book we are confronted with a page-turning denouement which made this reader at least want to applaud the author for her skill in starting with so many disparate themes and ending up with a startling resolution to all of them, much like the climax to an orchestral symphony.

Maxine Clarke wrote on her Amazon review of this book

It has strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in which two “normal” people (Gerda as Nelly Dean and Marianne as Lockwood) are the filter through which the reader experiences elemental, horrifically tragic and passionate events that are beyond the witness-narrators’ comprehension.

I see what she means and in particular the “elemental” nature of the experiences. I could use “Shakespearean” as an adjective too, for we read of the rise and fall of generations and reputations, the destruction of lineages.

I don’t often enjoy a book quite as much as this one. Its pretty damned good as they say. Its a literate read and the characters are wholly believable and very complex. I kept feeling that the book must have been written by a man for Karin Alvtegen seems to have burrowed deep into the male psyche and understood some typically male aspects of the motivations of ambition, sex, family and wealth. Not to say that men and women can’t write about the opposite sex, its just that in Shadow, the male characterisation is totally convincing.

2011 has seen me reading five Scandinavian novels so far and I am yet to be disappointed. Karin Alvtegen is a name I will add Sofi Oksanen, Jo Nesbo, Arnaldur Indridason as writers to watch out for when I want a book to devour in a few sittings.

Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

Tom — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:59:39 +0000

I enjoy reading the occasional thriller/crime novel and with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo being so highly reviewed I thought I would give it a try (especially having watched the BBC series “Wallander” based on novels by another Swedish writer, Henning Mankell).

Many readers will already know that the author, Stieg Larsoon, delivered the manuscripts for the three crime novels forming his Millennium Trilogy (this one is the first) to his publisher and then died suddenly and unexpectedly soon afterwards. This was a sad loss for despite their failings (at least in my opinion) this is a unique set of novels, the second. The Girl Who Played With Fire having now been published in the UK.

The book’s main theme is about the wealthy Vanger family, who over several generations have built up an industrial empire. However, despite their vast wealth, the family are dysfunctional to say the least, and have many skeletons in their cupboards. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is recruited by the elderly Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of Harriet Vanger who went missing thirty years ago.

In a parallel thread we read of Lisbeth Salander who is a troubled security specialist who spends her time free-lancing on special investigations using her skills in computer hacking and network-busting. Salander’s story runs parallel to Blomkvist for the first 250 pages or so, and it is not easy to see the connection between the two until they eventually meet up and work together on the Vanger case.

While I appreciate the complexity and thoroughness of this book, I would say its a four-star read rather than a five. For one thing, quite a number of its 538 pages are full of rather mind-numbing detail. The book gets off to a slow start, with a couple of hundred pages of scene-setting. In fact, I didn’t find myself really getting into the novel until I was half-way through it, when eventually Blomkvist and Salander get together. The book is a strange mixture of highly complex detail with intermittent sections of extreme violence of the Thomas Harris variety (think serial killers/sadist and Hannibal Lector).

I am not sure about the relationships between the characters. Blomkvist has sex with three women during the book, all three of whom are hurt in various ways by their encounters with him. The “nice guy “image of the author’s hero is somewhat tarnished by these – could someone so “nice” also be so unthinking about the effects he has on his serial partners?

Finally, I tend not to like books which begin with a diagram of a family tree – this usually means that their are so many characters that a diagram is required and this book is no exception. Admittedly by the end of the novel the reader is well-acquainted with most of them, and the family tree is no longer necessary but there were times when I was flipping back and forth to find even the particular Vanger whose first name begins with a “G” (OK, only five of them but you get my point).

For this book to work better, I would have liked it to be edited down to about 300 pages. I like long books, but not where their length is due to un-necessary complexity and detail which does not serve the story. I would also have reduced the number of characters (were all those Vanger’s really necessary?) and would have cut out much of the detail about the two reasearchers trolling through endless archives of family documents and photographs – I could feel the tedium of this activity rather more than I needed to. I think a shorter and more focused approach would have been much more successful and would have persuaded me to buy the next two volumes of the trilogy.