Reviews

the premise was intriguing and appropriately grim, but this book was just so.... boring. the logic behind choosing older people as organ donors/test subjects puzzled me, and the society itself was not well fleshed out (how is the concept of dispensables even financially feasible?). i wasn’t expecting an action-packed novel — these people are living in a place of constant “peace” and “comfort” — but there was ample room for the author to explore the psychology and mental health of the dispensables, and her failure to do so felt like a real missed opportunity to me. the circumstances of the unit should be fascinating, horrifying, haunting, but the characters are so passive and have such little depth that i hardly felt the impact. when i think of dystopian literature, i think of resistance; the characters should be dissatisfied with their situation, trying rebel against the system. the odd thing about the unit is that the characters aren't dissatisfied, at least not enough to really propel them into doing anything. dorrit's only act of rebellion doesn't come from the unit itself, but rather from

Spoiler

the death of johannes, and that relationship was so wooden and predictable that i hardly cared about it

. the biggest emotional wallop for me came from dorrit’s loss of and separation from her dog (mine is currently snoozing on my lap).

in a good book, the characters take on a life of their own; they become people in their own right, independent of the author. with the unit i was always aware that this was the author's construct, that it was her voice driving theirs. this book didn't swallow me the way i expected it to.

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4.0

At the age of fifty, Dorritt Weger finds herself child-less and working a “non-essential” job. The story begins with her being collected to live in the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material. This is a place where dispensable people go to slowly die. In this society, dispensable means that no family members are directly relying on you, you do not have children, a spouse or an “important” job in society.

The Unit is nearly perfect. Each dispensable person has a modestly furnished apartment to themselves. The Unit is created to fulfill any need that the dispensable person may have – there is a garden, a sauna, a pool, restaurants, painting supplies, televisions, etc.

But with that luxury comes a price. Aside from being constantly monitored by cameras, men over sixty and women over fifty participate in experimental trials and give up organs and biological material as it is needed by society.

What I found so compelling about this story was having Dorritt as a narrator. She is so perfectly candid about what it is like to be dispensable and to watch the friends you make in the Unit slowly lose parts of themselves. And it becomes even worse, when Dorritt falls in love with someone in the Unit, having never before really been in love.

The folks who work at the Unit don’t mind as long as Dorrit and her lover, Johannes, know that they are still dispensable. The way that Holmqvist describes their emotional attachment toward one other blossoms into love and then physical love is believable and touching. But it is also saddening. They both know that they don’t have very much time together and that they found one another too late in life. But they make the best use of their time that they can.

Dystopian fiction is honestly my favorite kind of fiction – and I try my best to read as much of it as I can. Something that I particularly enjoyed about this book, that I don’t often find, is that it doesn’t delve into what the outside world is like. I can slightly compare it to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but it gives even less information than Ishiguro does. We know only what Dorritt tells us. But she isn’t an unreliable narrator – it is just that her narrative has a purpose.

Having said that, I have high hopes that the author will write another piece in this universe. When the book was over, I felt like I had lost a few really good friends. I wanted to follow up on the other characters whose stories were unfinished – on the child – on Dorritt’s dog – on her estranged family.

But that is the mark of a good book, I think. Having finished reading it, I found myself thinking about it for days after. In that way, I guess I don’t want Holmqvist to write another book – because I’m growing fond of the one I created in my mind.