Book Description
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.
A Q&A with Ninni Holmqvist
Question: The Unit is not set in the present, but its echoes of present-day issues are clear and ominous. Describe the world of The Unit. Ninni Holmqvist: The Unit is a dystopia set in a near future. It is about people who don’t have any children or anyone else who loves them and need them, and who aren’t useful to the society in any other way either. These people are called “dispensable,” and they are picked up at their homes at a certain age (women at 50, men at 60) and taken to special units (“reservbanksenhet” in Swedish) for biological material, where they are supposed to serve the society through participating in various tests (like animal testing but made on people), but also, eventually, by donating organs to those of the society’s needed citizens—the ones who produce and raise children, the loved ones, the ones who contribute to the economic growth—who are afflicted with severe illnesses and need organs from healthy bodies to survive. Dorrit Weger, who just turned 50, is one of those dispensable. She is a writer, childless, quite poor, and lives alone with her dog. The story begins with her arrival at the unit, an establishment/institution she immediately finds a lot more comfortable and human and loving and beautiful than she ever could have expected.
Question: The Unit raises a number of complex—and sometimes disturbing—ethical questions. Do you see the novel as having a central moral theme?
Ninni Holmqvist: The book is above all written as a critique of society and the way political leaders today see everything in figures and numbers. But my aim was also to raise questions like: What is freedom? What is human dignity? How do we humans value our selves and each other? But The Unit is also very much a story about love (Dorrit meets the love of her life at the unit, a man called Johannes, and she also, miraculously, gets pregnant) and friendship and loyalty.
Question: Who did you write The Unit for? Did you have someone—personally, or in society—that you intended the story for?
Ninni Holmqvist: My intention was that it is for everyone. But I guess it might especially appeal to middle-aged single people, childless ones. But also people who are in or are close to other categories of “dispensable” people: disabled people for instance, long time unemployed persons, culture workers. And people who are critical of capitalism and economism. Perhaps also people who don’t mind being provoked.
This haunting first novel imagines a nation in which men and women who haven’t had children by a certain age are taken to a “reserve bank unit for biological material” and subjected to various physical and psychological experiments, while waiting to have their organs harvested for “needed” citizens in the outside world. The unit is a luxurious place, with a cinema, an art gallery, a sports complex, and beautiful gardens, and the residents give up kidneys, auditory bones, corneas, skin, and bits of their small intestines without a hint of resistance, until they are taken for their “final donation.” The novel’s thought experiment has limited scope, but Holmqvist evocatively details the experiences of a woman who falls in love with another resident, and at least momentarily attempts to escape her fate.
Review
Named one of the Best Novels of the Year by the Wall Street Journal
“Echoing work by Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, The Unit is as thought-provoking as it is compulsively readable.” --Jessa Crispin, author of Why I Am Not a Feminist
“A haunting, deadpan tale set vaguely in the Scandinavian future…Holmqvist’s spare prose interweaves the Unit’s pleasures and cruelties with exquisite matter-of-factness…[Holmqvist] turns the screw, presenting a set of events so miraculous and abominable that they literally made me gasp.” --The Washington Post
“This haunting first novel imagines a nation in which men and women who haven’t had children by a certain age are taken to a “reserve bank unit for biological material” and subjected to various physical and psychological experiments, while waiting to have their organs harvested for “needed” citizens in the outside world… Holmqvist evocatively details the experiences of a woman who falls in love with another resident, and at least momentarily attempts to escape her fate.” --The New Yorker
“Holmqvist handles her dystopia with muted, subtle care...Neither satirical nor polemical, The Unit manages to express a fair degree of moral outrage without ever moralizing…it has enough spooks to make it a feminist, philosophical page-turner.” --TimeOut Chicago
“This is one of the best books I’ve read over the past two years...Thought-provoking and emotionally-moving, The Unit is a book you’ll be discussing with others long after you’re done reading it.” --Orlando Sentinel
"Chilling…stunning…Holmqvist’s fluid, mesmerizing novel offers unnerving commentary on the way society devalues artistic creation while elevating procreation, and speculation on what it would be like if that was taken to an extreme. For Orwell and Huxley fans." --Booklist
"Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this novel imagines a chilling dystopia: single, childless, midlife women are considered dispensable. At 50 the narrator, Dorrit, is taken to a facility where non-vital organs will be harvested one by one for people more valued by society; she knows that eventually she’ll have to sacrifice something essential’ like her heart. Dorrit accepts her fate–until she falls in love and finds herself breaking the rules." --More Magazine
About the Author
Ninni Holmqvist
Ninni Holmqvist was born in 1958 and lives in Skåne, Sweden. She made her debut in 1995 with the short story collection Suit [Kostym] and has published two further collections of short stories since then. She also works as a translator. The Unit marks Holmqvist’s debut as a novelist.
Marlaine Delargy
Marlaine Delargy has translated novels by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kristina Ohlsson, and Helene Tursten, as well as The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist (Other Press) and Therese Bohman’s Drowned (Other Press). She lives in England.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marcela Valdes Here's a modest proposal: Now that Americans are raiding Medicare and unemployment funds more desperately than ever before, why don't we dispense with these mushy-gushy entitlement programs and lock up all the single people over 60 in a prison where we can harvest their organs? That way, these "dispensables," who aren't bolstering the nation's GDP, can contribute something to keep the prosperity of the "needed" citizens on track. Such is the horrifying premise behind Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist's first novel, "The Unit," a haunting, deadpan tale set vaguely in the Scandinavian future. Actually, in Holmqvist's book the situation is even more grotesque: In a nice sexist flourish, single women without children are classified as "dispensable" at 50, 10 years earlier than the men. So it is that one spring morning, Dorrit Weger finds herself standing outside her ramshackle house, waiting, like so much trash, for the SUV that will whisk her away to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Her lover has refused to leave his wife to marry her. Her freelance income barely covers the mortgage. Her only dependent is a soulful dog. The economy needs her not. It's one of Holmqvist's many nifty reversals that Dorrit already knows exactly what the Unit has in store for her: involuntary participation in drug trials and psychological experiments, forced kidney and lung donations. Her awareness is a change of pace for us. Loads of books and films have imagined worlds where humans prey upon the bodies of others -- "The Handmaid's Tale," "Never Let Me Go" and "Soylent Green" all come to mind -- but the convention of this cannibalistic genre is not to expose the use of bodies until deep into the story. In "The Unit," however, the dirty secret isn't secret; it's accepted national policy and not much cloaked in euphemism. "In a few weeks, I'm going in to donate my pancreas to a student nurse with four kids," one character casually mentions over dinner. The revelation, instead, is that the Unit turns out to be as much paradise as hell. The residents live in comfortable one-bedroom apartments. Their giant prison gleams with top-of-the-line luxuries, among them a library, an art gallery, a cafe, a gym, a music store and several fancy boutiques. They eat five-course meals. Best of all, for them, everything is free. Dorrit's favorite place is the Unit's enormous winter garden, where a living replica of Monet's Giverny wonderland thrives in a balmy artificial climate while snow piles up outside. The garden's lush plants serve as a pretty backdrop for many of the novel's scenes, but they're also a deft symbol for Dorrit and her ilk. Many of the Unit's residents are hothouse flowers: writers, artists, homosexuals and intellectuals whose pursuit of love, beauty or freedom has set them at odds with their marrying-and-producing peers. As one administrator observes, most of them never "experience the feeling of belonging, of being part of something with other people" until they're confined within the Unit's walls. Housed all together, freed from financial stress, drawn close by the looming prospect of death, these dispensables often find the golden apples they've been seeking all their lives, even as their "biological material" is harvested year by year. Holmqvist's spare prose interweaves the Unit's pleasures and cruelties with exquisite matter-of-factness, so that readers actually begin to wonder: On balance, is life better as a pampered lab bunny or as a lonely indigent? But then she turns the screw, presenting a set of events so miraculous and abominable that they literally made me gasp. By then, it's clear that even for married couples with children, the world outside the Unit has turned into a nightmare. And the issue of whether Dorrit is happier in her gleaming Dickensian prison gives way to a larger question: Who could bear to live in the mechanistic world that created such a place?
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It was more comfortable than I could have imagined. A room of my own with a bathroom, or rather a suite of my own, because there were two rooms: a bedroom and a living room with a kitchenette. It was light and spacious, furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors. True, the tiniest nook or cranny was monitored by cameras, and I would soon realize there were hidden microphones there too. But the cameras weren’t hidden. There was one in each corner of the ceiling–small but perfectly visible–and in every corner and every hallway that wasn’t visible from the ceiling; inside the closets, for example, and behind doors and protruding cabinets. Even under the bed and under the sink in the kitchenette. Anywhere a person might crawl in or curl up, there was a camera. Sometimes as you moved through a room they followed you with their one-eyed stare. A faint humming noise gave away the fact that at that particular moment someone on the surveillance team was paying close attention to what you were doing. Even the bathroom was monitored. There were no less than three cameras within that small space, two on the ceiling and one underneath the wash basin. This meticulous surveillance applied not only to the private suites, but also to the communal areas. And of course nothing else was to be expected. It was not the intention that anyone should be able to take their own life or harm themselves in some other way. Not once you were here. You should have sorted that out beforehand, if you were thinking along those lines.
“People who read books,” he went on, “tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”Highlighted by 231 Kindle readers
