Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
Jul. 19th, 2017 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsAmatka
4/5. My vacation* book. A woman goes to a neighboring colony for work, gets involved with her (lady) housemate, and discovers that there is something very, very wrong with their world. Oh, and by the way, this is on a planet(?) where objects only hold their shape/meaning if they are properly and repeatedly labeled with the right word. Trust me, it makes more sense in context. Well . . . it makes more thematic sense.
This is weird and wonderful and requires a lot of work. It's in translation (from Swedish), but it's a very skillful one, as far as I can tell. Which is necessary for a slim, intense, calculated book like this, where words really count. I keep thinking about this book – about how it intersects language and oppression, and about its explicable-if-you-work-hard ending. And the worldbuilding – it's spare but sharp as a knife, as the contours of this authoritarian democracy come into relief. For example, there's a wonderful detail that seemed to open up the whole book for me, about how poetry serves an entirely different function in this world than it does in ours.
And I really like the protagonist's slide into disobedience. Her inability to play along anymore is part old personal history, part recent stress and it makes sense. But not in a paint-by-numbers tragedy-happens-to-a-plucky-person way. More like . . . yes. That is how you slide a tiny bit out of step with your community, then a tiny bit more, and a tiny bit more, and suddenly, bam. You're in a different world.
Content notes: Discussion of reproductive coercion, some forced medical stuff by the authorities, etc.
*Vacation: in which we went to see my dying father and I don't know if I'll ever see him again, and also I retired my dog and settled her with her puppyraisers and I don't know if we'll ever see her again, and then we did some hiking. Do I know how to decompress from work or what?
4/5. My vacation* book. A woman goes to a neighboring colony for work, gets involved with her (lady) housemate, and discovers that there is something very, very wrong with their world. Oh, and by the way, this is on a planet(?) where objects only hold their shape/meaning if they are properly and repeatedly labeled with the right word. Trust me, it makes more sense in context. Well . . . it makes more thematic sense.
This is weird and wonderful and requires a lot of work. It's in translation (from Swedish), but it's a very skillful one, as far as I can tell. Which is necessary for a slim, intense, calculated book like this, where words really count. I keep thinking about this book – about how it intersects language and oppression, and about its explicable-if-you-work-hard ending. And the worldbuilding – it's spare but sharp as a knife, as the contours of this authoritarian democracy come into relief. For example, there's a wonderful detail that seemed to open up the whole book for me, about how poetry serves an entirely different function in this world than it does in ours.
And I really like the protagonist's slide into disobedience. Her inability to play along anymore is part old personal history, part recent stress and it makes sense. But not in a paint-by-numbers tragedy-happens-to-a-plucky-person way. More like . . . yes. That is how you slide a tiny bit out of step with your community, then a tiny bit more, and a tiny bit more, and suddenly, bam. You're in a different world.
Content notes: Discussion of reproductive coercion, some forced medical stuff by the authorities, etc.
*Vacation: in which we went to see my dying father and I don't know if I'll ever see him again, and also I retired my dog and settled her with her puppyraisers and I don't know if we'll ever see her again, and then we did some hiking. Do I know how to decompress from work or what?
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Date: 2017-07-20 02:16 am (UTC)Also, I'm sorry to hear about the hard things.
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Date: 2017-07-20 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-20 04:19 am (UTC)I'd be curious to know what you think. It's very . . . European? If that makes sense. I think I'm talking about that thing where you can sometimes catch glimpses of pervasive societal anxieties in dystopias, and the anxieties I glimpsed here weren't quite in the shape I'm used to.
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Date: 2017-07-20 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-01 04:35 pm (UTC)I picked this book up because of your review, and now it's on my short list of books to maybe teach next year, so...
As you said, it's not an easy book, but I'm glad I gave it a try!!!
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Date: 2017-08-01 11:40 pm (UTC)Yeah, I bet you really could make a lot of this book in an academic setting. There is a lot of there there.
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Date: 2017-08-07 01:47 am (UTC)The strong implication in those stories was, "this is what will happen if we give an inch in the slide towards Communism." So it was eerie to see those very same opressions justified, in the culture of Amatka, as safeguards against a more tangible slide into gray goo. The same fear directed at a different manifestation of change.
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Date: 2017-08-07 02:36 am (UTC)Huh, interesting.
It took me a while to realize just how on-the-nose the goo is, thematically. As in 'if we don't follow all of these rules exactly, society will literally fall apart!" But of course it took a poet to say, "...yes? and your problem is?"
no subject
Date: 2017-08-14 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-14 09:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's been weeks and I still keep randomly thinking about this book. Even though I keep feeling like I'm done with it? Apparently not.
Am about to try Whitehead's Underground Railroad, speaking of allegory over which I have concerns because agreed, allegory makes me tired.