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"A surreal and shockingly original debut novel set in a dystopian world shaped by language--literally. Vanja, a government worker, leaves her home city of Essre for the austere, wintry colony of Amatka on a research assignment. It takes some adjusting: people act differently in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja finds herself falling in love with her housemate, Nina, and decides to stick around. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by its administration, she begins an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk. In Karin Tidbeck's dystopic imagining, language has the power to shape reality. Unless objects, buildings, and the surrounding landscape are repeatedly named, and named properly, everything will fall apart. Trapped in the repressive colony, Vanja dreams of using language to break free, but her individualism may well threaten the very fabric of reality. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by an idiosyncratic new voice"--… (more)
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But not only. Because there’s right from the start also another thing, much more original and sinister: this is a world where matter itself is constantly on the verge of collapsing. Only meticulous watching, branding and naming, on a daily basis, is what keeps a bed a bed and not just a puddle of white slime. And pretty soon Tidbeck is taking us into much more original landscapes, eerie and dreamlike, right up until the wide open, utterly strange end.
I really enjoyed reading this slender debut novel. It’s not perfect, but it packs a punch, and Tidbeck really knows how to create an ambience. I wouldn’t hesitate to file it under “New weird” (first Swedish example of it?), and am very pleased to learn the Jeff VanderMeer will publish Tidbeck’s work in English. It’s almost shameful it took a brit (thank you Claire!) to point her out to me. I’m fairly sure I’ll read everything she writes from here on.
I received this novel as an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
It takes place in a world that feels like a post-Soviet dystopia. There are all sorts of hints about the world, but so much about the world is never explained. Apparently it is built on ruins built by some other civilization
The big innovation is that (almost) everything in this world is manufactured out of a kind of grey goo, and will revert to sludge unless continually “marked”, verbally and in writing, with its name. Even book titles must directly reference the content of the book, so we get hilarious poetry collections called “About Plant House #3” and — the one that creased me up — “About Trains”. On one level we can read this as an assertion of the primacy and potency of language, or rather of nomenclature, but by the end I thought it meant the opposite of this — that objects and the material world are actually just as arbitrary as the world of sound and sign. It’s an ersatz world of mushroom porridge, mushroom coffee, where anything can substitute for anything else.
The story follows Vanya on a trip to Amatka, one of four “colonies” on an inimical alter-earth, to do market research (the first private enterprises having recently been permitted). There she falls in an anaemic kind of love with her host, Nina, and also finds herself drawn into a mystery which threatens to unpick the fabric of her tenuously-maintained reality. I found it quite slow going, but the denouement makes up for the preceding drabness with some satisfyingly apocalyptic events, albeit the opposite of conclusive, only serving to confuse matters even more. A strange book, very much in the Vandermeer (who seems to have sponsored the project) mould with its uncanniness, intriguing premise and total refusal to commit itself.