Amatka

by Karin Tidbeck

Paperback, 2017

Status

Available

Publication

Vintage (2017), 224 pages

Description

"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)

User reviews

LibraryThing member GingerbreadMan
Any lover of dystopias will be more than familiar with the basic setup in Karin Tidbeck’s debut. A society where there’s a shortage of almost anything, where censorship, propaganda and informing on your neighbor run the everyday lives of the citizens – who get their jobs chosen for them by
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the Board and give up their kids to be raised by the community at age seven. A limited free enterprise between the four colonies has just been enforced, and as a result Vanja is sent to the northern colony Amatka to do a census about hygiene articles, to possibly pave the way for export. Where she meets a librarian, who lets her in on a dangerous secret: there used to be another way of living… Yeah, I know. The beginning is well done and full of ambience, but there’s a hefty load of tropes going on.

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.
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LibraryThing member Gretchening
This is a strange book and I've struggled to write a review of it. To describe the plot makes it sound strange, if not farcical, but the experience of reading this book makes the plot feel more... surreal than anything. I found myself relating with the protagonist, Vanja, who has a nothing-special
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paper-pushing-type job and is sent on assignment to do market research on the inhabitants of the next commune over. Things are strange in her world, but to her that strangeness is normal--all objects must be frequently labeled in writing and named aloud--'pencil' and 'suitcase' etc., so that they don't dissolve into a gloop that is frightening and upsetting in a way that the residents refuse to face. As a midwesterner, I can relate to this sort of firm, almost aggressive, active ignorance. Vanja finds herself more and more curious about the ways in which the rules of her strict society don't make sense, she looks a little too closely at the explanations for various events and rationales for different rules, and things begin to unravel from there. This book will be a hard sell in some ways--it's got an allmost frustrating lack of context, it leaves very little truly explained, but the banal, surreal horror of it all is affecting nonetheless. I keep thinking about this book and I think for a certain kind of experimental, politically-minded reader, particularly one conversant with classics of 70s science fiction, this will be a winning book.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
Short sf(?) work in which a group of colonists, in four settlements, governed by a collective/communist-style government, live on a world that is not stable: unless objects came from Earth, they don’t hold their shape unless they are repeatedly named: pencil, suitcase, chair. The protagonist is a
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researcher for a cosmetics startup (the collective is experimenting with some private enterprise) who comes to a new settlement, falls in love with a woman, and threatens the body politic—quite literally. It was interesting in theory but so short and understated that I didn’t get much out of it, and I fondly remembered the funny David Brin book The Practice Effect while I was reading it.
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LibraryThing member veeshee
This novel had an interesting premise and concept. The idea that language shapes the world is one that is prevalent among sociologists but it is a concept that is not really considered by many people. The idea to base a story on this is remarkable and I think the author created a very provocative
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novel here. The writing style is unique in that it doesn't actually tell you things straight to your face. The information needs to be gleaned through careful reading and connecting of the different clues laid out by the author. The magnanimity of the situation at hand only becomes clear as you continue to read the story. The ability to make the reader think deeper is not easy to do, but the author does it here effortlessly. For those reasons, I loved the prose and writing style employed here. This is not a fast-paced story and you will be sorely disappointed if you are looking for a high-intensity action novel. This didn't bother me in the slightest because the pacing worked to convey the intent of this novel. However, I wasn't as happy with the characters. It was very difficult to connect with Vanja (or any of the characters). All of the characters were aloof and it was hard for me as a reader to understand them. While I understand that the dystopian world in this novel discourages emotional connection, I thought the author could still have found a way to make the characters feel things in a way that would make sense to the reader. This lack of emotional connection is especially problematic when considering the relationship between Vanja and Nina: there didn't seem to be any. I didn't expect there to be a full blown romance but the interactions between these 2 characters was not strong enough for me to feel they were in love. However, this was the only real negative I could find with this novel. Overall, this is a compelling and interesting story that will really force the reader to think deeply on the various themes that come into focus in the novel. I'm giving this a 4/5 stars because it deeply resonated with me; this is a story I am not likely to forget any time soon!

I received this novel as an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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LibraryThing member nmele
This novel intrigued me initially, but in the end I found it unsatisfying--a little too impressionistic for my taste, although many folks will enjoy it.
LibraryThing member dwhatson
Karin Tidbeck covers a lot of ground in 213 pages and does it with an understated elegance. This was a deceptively quick read and I found myself ruminating upon Tidbeck's novel for a few days after I'd finished it. With each reflection, there was always something else to unpack. If weird, strange
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or speculative fiction is your thing then Karin Tidbeck's "Amatka" beckons.
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LibraryThing member aickman
I picked this up because I was in the mood for a dystopian story, and this had been classified as such. There are indeed dystopian themes in the tale, but there is also a wealth of other themes and ideas coalescing in this cerebral, complex novel. The work resonates on both an intellectual and
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emotional level. And while you may find this book in the science fiction section, it has its feet firmly planted in the weird lit world. Highly recommend!
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LibraryThing member dreamweaversunited
Very interesting and imaginative premise.
LibraryThing member quondame
Composed about equally of postpartum depression and nightmare, this might be an exploration into the nature of perceived reality except in our bubble of real we do experience comforts and beauties, even seek them, and Tidbeck presents comfort in a watered down offhand way while griddling us on grey
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oppression.
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LibraryThing member Gwendydd
This book was fascinating and compelling and ultimately very disappointing.

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
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or species, and there is no sky, and everything is made out of mushrooms, and if you don't write labels on things daily, they turn into goo. I was pretty fascinated by the goo, but it is never fully explained and that's frustrating. There are a lot of secrets in this world, and to some extent everyone knows there are things they aren't supposed to know so they intentionally ignore those parts of reality. The main character, Vanya, wants to learn more about these secrets so she goes poking around in places where she shouldn't and she ultimately gets in big trouble and gets everyone else in trouble, but neither she nor the reader ever finds any answers.
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LibraryThing member yarb
Amatka is a dystopia with a whole lot in common with its famous forebears. We’ve got a micromanagerial socialist state à la Zamyatin or Orwell, rationing food and dismantling the nuclear family with a collective rearing system. We have characters whose names include numbers (never explained, so
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presumably just another depersonalizing device), familiar from many a science fiction yarn. Speaking of food, the numbingly bland, mushroom-based diet of Amatka’s inhabitants, combined with their ritual of “recycling” the deceased, puts the reader more than a little in mind of Soylent Green. We also touch on the preservational theme of A Canticle for Leibowitz or Mockingbird, the valorisation of old texts and prelapsarian knowledge. The aesthetic as a whole is overwhelmingly bleak, functional and joyless, and peculiarly Scandi — like an IKEA catalogue in monochrome. This is an observation, not a criticism — the world built here by Tidbeck ain’t no Disneyland, but it is quite convincing and an interesting place to stumble around for a few hours.

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.
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Awards

Locus Award (Finalist — First Novel — 2018)
Compton Crook Award (Nominee — 2018)

Language

Original language

English

Barcode

9184
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