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.” —Washington Post
“Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax—creepily profound and most provocative.” —Kirkus Reviews
“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.” —New Yorker
“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
“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
“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.” —Time Out Chicago
“The Unit raises issues of love, gender, freedom, and social mores through the perspective of how we assess an individual’s contribution to society…Holmqvist’s ability to invest the reader in both the story and the characters is exceptional. It is a book you hesitate to put down…The Unit deserves a wide readership.” —Blogcritics.org
“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
“An exploration of female desire, human need, and the purpose of life.” —Publishers Weekly
“The message is bold if not on the nose: If you don’t fall into a classic nuclear family, then your value as a human are the spare parts you can give those who do contribute to traditional family structures. The book’s main character, a writer named Dorrit, is forced to think about the meaning of her life. She’d had a lover, but he wouldn’t leave his wife; she’d birthed art, but never a child. Holmqvist’s writing is clear and precise…the clinical tone contributes to the The Unit’s eeriness. The Unit itself is a place of luxury—amenities include a library, a cafe, immaculately manicured gardens—but it feels as much like home to Dorrit as the promotional photos of an upscale condo. Holmqvist’s is a book of quiet cruelty, and perhaps the most harrowing twist of all is that the world outside the walls of the Unit—one with married couples, one with children—seems even worse. In that way, The Unit’s strength is uncovering beauty in bleakness.”—GQ.com
“Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, originally published in 2006, offers a shrewd, timely exploration of gender…The novel has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, but where Margaret Atwood’s classic focuses on procreation, Holmqvist’s novel feels broader, holding both capitalism and traditional gender roles under a harsh light. Dorrit is honest about her life, and she wonders whether the freedom she had in her youth was worth the price she pays now. Any woman — young or old — will relate to her plight.” —Washington Post
"Ninni Holmqvist’s 2009 book The Unit, newly reissued, imagines a world in which people who haven’t procreated are forced to make a different—ultimate—contribution to society...The Unit feels like an inversion of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where fertile women are forcibly impregnated under biblical sanction. Here, the justification for horror—the extraction of human tissue from the childfree—is secular, a capitalist democracy demanding its toll... The Unit contains elements that echo a number of different speculative and dystopian works. The domed environment and omnipresent cameras seem to predict Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy; the prospect of forcible organ donation brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go... Holmqvist’s intention isn’t realism—it’s to unravel and critique assumptions about the meaning of life. Is it criminal, she wonders, to live a quiet life dedicated only to self-actualization? Do artists who never achieve greatness have value? Does every citizen have a responsibility to contribute to their society? In exploring such questions, Holmqvist takes liberal assumptions about Scandinavian paternalism versus American individualism and flips them upside down... Holmqvist’s writing is spare in style, elegantly succinct, but the layers of the world she’s created are manifold. Other dystopian stories like The Handmaid’s Tale might seem particularly chilling in a moment when democracy feels like it’s under threat, but The Unit is haunting in its assertion that democracy itself isn’t enough. The tyranny of popular sentiment can be just as dangerous, Holmqvist argues,presenting scene after scene of intelligent, compassionate citizens indoctrinated into doubting their own worth.” —TheAtlantic.com
“Margaret Atwood has a line on the cover, and no surprise—this dystopian tale of childless men and women relocated in middle age to 'a reserve bank unit for biological material' rivals The Handmaid’s Tale for a weirdly believable future in which the childless support families with children giving up parts of their bodies until, at last, they make their ‘final donation’ and disappear altogether. The reasonableness of this system feels very Scandinavian, certainly very Canadian…Holmqvist has written the sci-fi novel of our narcissistic era, when many people choose to focus on themselves and their art (Dorrit, the heroine of this novel, is a literary fiction writer) or their career over marriage and family. Not being needed by others is a boon when one is young but a death sentence for the middle aged.” —Hudson Review
"Translated into English in 2009 and recently reissued, this Swedish novel imagines a dystopian future for the childless in which literally offering pieces of yourself is a legitimate contribution to society…Not only is it an intimate portrait of creative, single individuals coming to terms with a graphic and imminent death, but their apparent willingness to accept it for the good of others…This begs the question: what does it mean to be a good citizen? To whom are we ultimately responsible? How do we, as well as our society, measure worth? What is the value of one life or the cost of another?” —Buzz Magazines
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A taut, surreal debut novel from Sweden, The Unit is a surprising celebration of love and life in the face of certain death. Dorrit Weger is a writer who has just turned 50. In middle age, without children, great professional success, or work in a necessary industry, she's considered "dispensable" and taken to live at the Second Reserve Unit for Biological Material. There she is expected to act as a human guinea pig, undergoing increasingly risky scientific experiments and donating her organs to "needed" members of society, until she makes her "final donation." But the world she enters is also a retreat from a world that has rejected those on the margins of society. In the "luxury slaughterhouse," Dorrit becomes part of a caring group of friends and even falls in love, causing her life to take an unexpected turn.
With a voice reminiscent of such disparate masters as Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury, Holmqvist has created a fascinating portrait of a stark society that cares only for its most productive members. The Unit explores how far society can go to shun those unwilling to conform, and how those exiled can create their own community of love and caring, even under the darkest of circumstances.
(Fall 2009 Selection)
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)
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Pricey shops that require no money. Gardens that trump Monet's. Creature comforts galore. But Swedish ace Holmqvist's English-language debut soon discloses a catch. The shelf-life for inhabitants of this paradise is about six years. This is the Second Reserve Bank Unit, into which the State herds women 50 and up, and men 60 and over, to use for biological material. They're fattened like calves, but there's civic-duty payback: mandatory organ donation, culminating in the final "gift" of their lungs and hearts. Big Brother doesn't take every oldster, just those termed "dispensables": the cash-strapped, underachieving or, worst of all, childless. Dorrit Weger, freelance writer, dog-lover and free sprit, is initially mesmerized by her new surroundings. She feels a sense of community, a closeness never offered by Nils, the inadequate lover who would never leave his wife. And she takes pride in being needed when she's enlisted in one of the Unit's many medical experiments. It's a benign investigation into the effects of exercise, but in the cafeteria and on the lush grounds Dorrit soon notices other campers sleepwalking like zombies or displaying weirdly blotched skin. As her roommates are ushered off one by one to their final donations, she panics into the arms of Johannes, a fellow Unit resident who actually manages to impregnate her. Dazzled by upcoming motherhood, Dorrit is certain her bulging belly will gain her freedom. Proven at last productive, she's bound to be rewarded by the State . . . .isn't she? In her first novel, short-story writer Holmqvist echoes political-science treatises like Hobbes' Leviathan and Rousseau's The Social Contract (gone decidedly mad here), as well as theusual dystopian novels from Brave New World to 1984. Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax-creepily profound and most provocative. Agent: Magdelena Hedlund/Norstedts Agency
