Product Description

When Dorrit Wegner turned fifty, the government transferred her to a state-of-the-art facility where she can live out her days in comfort. Her apartment is furnished to her tastes, her meals expertly served, and all at the very reasonable non-negotiable price of one cardiopulmonary system. Once an outsider without family, derided by a society bent on productivity, Dorrit finds within The Unit the company of kindred spirits and a dignity conferred by 'use' in medical tests. But when Dorrit also finds love, her peaceful submission is blown apart and she must fight to escape before her 'final donation'.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25604 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-09
• Released on: 2009-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781590513132
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
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.

From 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
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.

---

Customer Reviews

Chilling
The Unit tells the story of a near-future society that divides its people into two groups: those who are necessary and those who are "dispensable." The latter category is comprised of women 50 years and older and men 60 and older who are childless and don't work in a "necessary" industry. Many of the dispensables are artists. The primary character, a woman named Dorrit, is a writer who has just passed her 50th birthday.

Because they do not contribute to the future society by raising children, the dispensable people are considered selfish. They followed their dreams of self-fulfillment and therefore when they reach late middle age it's time to "pay the piper," so to speak, by offering themselves up for scientific experimentation and organ donation. The Unit is the housing/medical facility where they live while serving as test subjects, until it comes time to make their "final donation," usually their hearts and lungs. These donations are always made to people who are "needed" by their families.

Originally written in Swedish, the novel is marvelously translated by Marlaine Delargy. I say this not because I can read Swedish but because the English translation gave me chills as I read it. Anyone who can create prose that, quite literally, fills readers with anxiety and fear must, it seems to me, have created a superior translation.

One of the many things that is striking about the plot of The Unit is that, once inside the medical facility, the dispensables generally find freedom and an ability to be themselves that they lacked on the outside, where they were made to feel different and generally useless. Even though the unit offers them many creature comforts that they did not have before, it is still a prison and the place where they will be institutionally murdered. Yet most of the characters clearly value the acceptance and even love that they feel within the unit community. Through these characters, author Ninni Holmqvist raises some intriguing questions about the nature of "community" and how its various members become insiders or outsiders.

The one criticism I have of The Unit is that its central concept -- that of a society creating a separate, social caste of organ donors -- is strongly derivative of an earlier, brilliantly original novel by Kazuo Ishiguro called Never Let Me Go. Although Holmqvist devlops this idea in a different way than did Ishiguro, her plot seems too close to Ishiguro to warrant five stars. Nevertheless, I recommend this novel, especially to readers who enjoy stories in the genre of science fiction/future dystopia.

A powerful vision of a dystopian society
In The Unit, Holmqvist takes us into a dystopian world that is more frightening because it seems so familiar. In this near-future or alternative society (it is never clear which), people are are deemed "dispensable" are confined to the unit, a dreamlike world where they have no wants unmet, while they are efficiently employed as subjects of dangerous experiments and their organs systematically harvested for the benefit of the "needed." To not have children is the primary means of becoming dispensable, although they seem to be drawn from the ranks of artists, writers and others who cannot conform to middlebrow society for one reason or another.

Dorritt is such a person. Before coming to the unit, her closest relationship was with her dog. But once there, she experiences for the first time true friendship, love and acceptance for who she is, which makes her quiet, detached descriptions of the emotional and phsyical tortures that her friend and, ultimately, she suffers there all the more horrifying.

The power of The Unit is its subtlety. We never really know how a supposedly democratic society instituted this practice of harvesting their fellow citizens, or why the people tolerate it, although we are given hints. As the story progresses, we learn that there are fewer and fewer dispensable people, so that the definition of who is unneeded must be expanded to keep up the supply of organs and test subjects. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the unit seem unaccountably resigned to their fates, but as Dorritt tells her story, we almost come to understand why -- which makes it all the more terrifying.

The Unit was originally published in Sweded and was translated into English by Marlaine Delargy. I haven't read a lot of Swedish literature, but given the quality of this novel, I should seek out more. Highly recommended.

Note: This review is based on a reading copy provided by the publisher.

Chilling view of the ultimate in social isolation
The Unit is a gripping novel reminiscent of the surveillance and control of Orwell's 1984, the reproductive problems of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, and the genetic experimentation of Huxley's Brave New World, with something of White's Charlotte's Web mixed in, but at its core, the story is hard to believe.

Dorrit is a 50 year old woman living in a version of Stockholm, possibly in the near future. She is a single woman with no children and no particular social attachments -- except to her dog. She has never had a romantic relationship, just a serious of "casual liasons," most recently with a man who "almost" loves her.

It is a cautionary tale, to be sure, but of what, exactly, I remained somewhat unclear. The obvious target is the idea of a utilitarian society bent on using the bodies of socially unnecessary people to keep the rest of society alive. These older people have their organs and body parts harvested through organ donation (in small bits at first, such as the cornea or one kidney, until the "final donation" is made) and as subjects of what seem to be amazingly poorly designed studies of various medical treatments. Apparently rats are too expensive in this society to figure out that one pill is contaminated with poisons, for example, and another study had 90% serious side effects, including death; we are led to believe that people are so desperate for organs that they readily accept these contaminated specimens. This model of health care and societal structure are clearly repugnant as well as hard to imagine.

After further reflection upon finishing the novel, I came back to something a member of the staff said to the new arrivals during Dorrit's orientation, and that is that finally they would be in a place where they would feel welcome and comfortable. And that, I think, is the most disturbing part of the book, and the one in which we can see Dorrit as much less sympathetic than she initially appears. It becomes clear that mainstream society is composed of a very distant, "efficient" sort of relationships, and Dorrit herself has been unable to find love and has not maintained her own family ties. She admits that she really gave the policy regarding "dispensables" no thought until she herself was ready to be checked in to the Unit, even to the point of not noticing the vanishing of anyone else who'd ever gone before her.

There are many unanswered questions about the complicity of Dorrit and all the other "dispensables" in their own abuse. And this reminded me of the scene in Charlotte's Web where Wilbur has the chance to escape from his pen, and does so, only to decide that it is entirely too overwhelming -- indeed, too much work -- to be on his own, and it's so much easier to follow the farmer, with his bucket of slops, back into the pen. This is, of course, before he learns that he is meant to be killed and transformed into dinner, the reality of which leaves him horrified, outraged, and depressed. Neither of these emotions seem to be the case for Dorrit, who knows her fate before she checks in to the Reserve Bank. She quietly goes right along, not bothering with detailed plans of escape, resistance, attempts to bring about a change in the law, or even emigrating before her 50th birthday (considering that several of her siblings live in other countries, not such a bad idea). She doesn't even observe exits in the Unit. She is too busy gorging herself on the free buffets.

Holmqvist sketches only briefly a picture of the society in which Dorrit has been living -- a society that is rigidly ridding itself of traditional gender roles. It is, Dorrit tells us, a crime for a man to fix a woman's car while she cooks him dinner in appreciation. Now a man and woman must share parental leave equally for 18 months, and then it's off to 8 hours a day of mandatory babysitting until the age of 6, leaving no excuses for not having children. Relationships are about convenience and seem mostly devoid of any warmth. Nevertheless Dorrit seems to have found friendship and companionship in a way that is completely opposite to what is found in the outside society. She maintains a deep connection to her dog, finding great satisfaction in obtaining a photograph of him in his new home with his new "family," but refuses the chance to have another, seemingly more important photograph of someone else in her new home, with her new family. That, as far as I am concerned, demonstrates that she has remained aloof from her own soul and has completely given up normal human desires.

I found "The Unit" to be a page-turner, but the second half of the book was disappointing, and I found the ending to be emotionally unsatisfying. I found the lack of self-concern, the lack of the desire for self-preservation, to be rather un-human, and quite chilling. The idea that all it takes is a nice garden, free food, and feigned concern for people to happily allow themselves to be murdered is extremely disturbing but ultimately unrealistic. But wondering if someone could really be so distant from the self was certainly troubling.