Ninni holmqvist biography meaning

If you don’t have children, if you choose to follow your dream instead of choosing compromise or security or “normality” (read: heterosexuality), what is your life worth? Not much, in this futuristic Scandinavian society. You are designated as a “dispensable,” which means you are locked away to have your body available for testing and organ harvesting on behalf of those who contribute more usefully to the nation’s prosperity.

The facility to which you are taken is a plush one, designed to quash all thoughts of noncompliance. Everything is free, including delicious food and new clothes; there are lovely garden walkways and top-of-the-line sports facilities, crafts, dancing, movies, and even a library. For the women over 50 and men over 60 delivered to the institution each month, it seems ideal….until, of course, your pancreas or lungs or heart is needed for someone else.

Dorrit Weger, a would-be writer, is sad when she first arrives at the Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material. She misses her dog Jock terribly, but soon warms up to her new friends and even acquires a new love interest. Likewise, she adapts quickly to the omnipresent surveillance – there are cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny – and after a short while she forgets they are there. She spends her early days in the facility undergoing tests, swimming, visiting the theater, and going to the library.

Kjell, who volunteers in the library, points out to Dorrit that the library is quite busy:

“‘…it’s because there are so many intellectuals here. People who read books.’

‘I see,’ I said…’

‘People who read books,’ he went on, ‘tend to be dispensable. Extremely.’”

Dorrit has spent her life resisting dependency on others and following her youthful dream of writing. Paradoxically, she buys into the gender stereotypes with no equivocation:

“I think it’s beautiful when men show their physical strength openly without being ashamed of it or apologizing. And I think it’s

Yes, I did actually have a house. When I say that I was picked up outside my house, I don’t just mean my home, my residence, but my actual house. Despite my very low and irregular income, I had managed to get a bank loan some eight years earlier, just before I turned forty-two, to buy a little place I’d been to look at several times, and one of my life’s dreams had been fulfilled: a house of my own and a garden of my own on the open, rolling plain between the Romele Ridge and the south coast.

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But I hadn’t been able to afford to maintain the house. The bargeboards and the window frames were rotten, the paint was flaking, the roof leaked in at least two places, and new drainage was needed all the way around the house. My income just about covered the interest on the loan, paying it off in the smallest possible installments; wood and electricity and maintenance costs, plus insurance, taxes, gas, and food for myself and my dog. And I don’t think it could have made much difference to the state coffers when the confiscation authority sold the house at auction—that is if they managed to sell it at all in its present condition.

But despite the fact that I’d let the house get so run down, and despite the fact that it was old-fashioned and impractical, and cold and drafty in the winter and damp and stuffy in the summer, at least it was my very own home, my sanctuary, a place over which I and no one else had control, whe

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The Unit

by
Ninni Holmqvist

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• Swedish title: Enhet
• Translated by Marlaine Delargy

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Our Assessment:

B : written well enough, but very creepy and not entirely convincing

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Hätte sie die Kraft und den Mut gefunden, die Redundanzen, die Befindlichkeitswucherungen, die etwas ermüdenden Beschreibungen ihres Vorlebens zu streichen, man könnte von einem beachtlichen Roman sprechen." - Arnd Rühle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "The novel�s thought experiment has limited scope, but Holmqvist evocatively details the experiences of a woman who falls in love with another resident, and at least momentarily attempts to escape her fate." - The New Yorker
  
  
• "Ninni Holmqvist skriver med en effektiv blandning av varm inlevelse och registrerande kyla, och jag dras snabbt in i hennes klaustrofobiska framtidsvision. Ett bra tag ser Enhet ut att vara en riktigt bra roman. Men någonstans efter halva boken tappar berättelsen fart och börjar trampa runt i samma spår. (...) Hennes första roman �r hur som helst inte helt lyckad. Vore jag riktigt cynisk skulle jag till och med kalla den umbärlig." - Eva Johansson, Svenska Dagbladet
  
  
• "Holmqvist's spare prose interweaves the Unit's pleasures and cruelties with exquisite matter-of-factness, so that readers actually begin to wonder: On balance, is life better as a pampered lab bunny or as a lonely indigent? But then she turns the screw, presenting a set of events so miraculous and abominable that they literally made me gasp." - Marcela Valdes, The

“It was more comfortable than I could have imagined,” is how The Unit begins, with Dorrit, a single, impoverished 50-year-old woman picked up from her home in a metallic red SUV and transported to a luxury facility constructed by the government for people just like her. Her new, two-room apartment is bright and spacious, “tastefully decorated,” inside a complex that includes a theater, art studios, a cinema, a library, and gourmet restaurants. For the first time, Dorrit is surrounded by likeminded people and included rather than ostracized. At the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material, she’s one among a community of people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—have children.

The cost is that, for the remaining four or five years of her life, Dorrit will be subjected to medical testing and will donate her organs one by one until her final, fatal donation. The Unit’s author, the Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, has imagined a society fixated on capital, but in human form. Those who have children or who work in fields like teaching and healthcare are seen as enabling growth; the childless and creative types like Dorrit, a writer, are deemed “dispensable,” removed, and forced to make their own biological contributions. The unit itself is a fantasy of government welfare for aging citizens (it offers delicious meals, culture, and companionship), but with a particularly sharp twist.

And yet one of the most jarring elements of the book is the extent to which all the residents not only accept but affirm their own status. “All this luxury! How much is all this costing the taxpayer?” Dorrit’s new friend Elsa remarks, aghast, when she sees the well-appointed exercise facilities. Dorrit r