The Unit

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Remarkably stunning portrait of life in a society where certain groups of people are considered dispensible to the world at large, and are harvested like a field for whatever they can offer.

Dorrit is a writer. She lives alone in her small house with her dog Jock. She walks on the beach, and reads, and writes, and is having a torrid love affair with a married man. Her life isn't perfect, but it's hers and makes her happy. Unfortunately, she is also turning 50, and in her society when you turn 50 as a woman (or 60 as a man) and are childless and without an important or caretaking job you become dispensible.

You are transferred to a unit where you'll have no worries for the rest of your brief life. You're provided with an apartment and plenty of amenities, such as a full gym, shopping centers where you never have to pay, movie theaters and art galleries. There's a library to find reading materials, and if you're an artist or writer, you'll recieve a studio or computer to work on your craft.

Most of the people in The Unit remind me of me. They're writers and artists and librarians, ladies who worked in a shoe store all their lives who kept their nose stuck in a book, and men who quietly worked a full career while writing in their spare time, their hearts broken too much to fall in love. They are people I would want to hang out with, and people I could love. They're people I could be.

The crisp briskness of the prose is startling in places, but rather amazing to read. The author doesn't coddle the reader, but forces them to face the harsh realities that a society which focuses on only tangilble contributions can create. I often had to stop reading, my eyes full of tears, because I was so affected by this novel. One night in bed, after reading about how Dorrit's lover Nils refused to write an affadavit stating that she was loved (because he would have to leave his wife - who he didn't love - and that would mean his child would grow up in a single parent home) I sobbed to my husband, making him assure me that he would write such an affadavit, stating that his love for me meant I should be saved. Yes, it truly got into my head.

And in a good way, I think, because it highlights the inherent value of the people that society sometimes puts in a corner. I feel this way sometimes as I'm not raising a child right now. People don't, on meeting me, know that I once had a child, and therefore I seem somehow less to them, somehow not connected. I have seen it in their eyes; that sense that I don't understand their life, couldn't understand, that I just don't have what makes life worthwhile. I feel pushed to the edge of conversations, where I politely smile and hope for the conversation to turn from babysitters and diapers to books or movies or somewhere I can contribute. I want to scream that there is more to life, sometimes, that there is more to them, and to please connect with me. Occasionally I'll bring up an experience from my brief time with my daughter Grace, but often that is more painful than staying silent.

The problem with staying silent is that you validate that trap of being seen as less, that trap which might lead you into a Unit, yourself.



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