So I thought this was excellent but I'm not sure how widely I'd recommend it. It's a quiet, odd, unsettling dystopian novel - my first from Swedish author Karin Tidbeck - that opens up more questions than it answers. Pair this with the ambiguous ending and I can easily see why some readers might feel dissatisfied.

I actually really d it, though. I found it an extremely atmospheric novel-- the greyness, the loneliness, the constant sense of wrongness about everything. On the back of the Vintage paperback, Matt Bell praises the author's imagination as being "fiercely strange", which I think is a fitting description of the whole book.

The story opens on a train, with government worker Vanja travelling to the colony of Amatka to do some consumer research on hygiene products. Vanja is assigned a household through a lottery, which is where she meets Nina, as well as two other housemates called Ivar and Ulla. Straight away, there's this feeling behind everything that something is not quite right. This feeling never goes away.

More strange things surface. The importance of language and naming things is a central theme, with all objects requiring labelling in order to maintain the very fabric of reality. As Vanja digs a little deeper, she notes the barrenness of the library; of texts missing their ending. The cold emptiness of this world is given moments of warmth by the burgeoning relationship between Vanja and Nina.

What emerges is an examination of a society of complete social equality, of communal living and strict adherence to rules that benefit the group as a whole, sometimes at the expense of the individual. My takeaway was that when we are all reduced to the same, treated the same, as one part of a whole, we become little more than atoms. Pliable and interchangeable.

I suppose this is a critique of the kind of extreme socialism that cannot end well. I think. Maybe. It's not actually easy to tell whether this world is better or worse than the alternatives. Which is perhaps the most unsettling thing of all.

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube2019 dystopia-utopia329 s Hannah609 1,149

That was weird. Seriously weird, but oddly fascinating, but with an ending I found unsatisfying. My thoughts are all over the place for this one, so here they are first in list format and then a bit more elaborated.

Pros:
World building
Atmosphere
Mood
Pacing

Cons:
Characters
Prose
Conclusion.

Set in the not specified future on a (I assume) different planet, this books reads very much a classic dystopian novel in the style of Ray Bradbury or George Orwell. The main character, Vanja, arrives in Amatka with the order to do some kind of market research on hygiene products as commercial production has been legalized and her employer wants to know how to sell more stuff to this colony. As she falls in love with her housemate Nina, she decides to stay in this barren place even though things seem odd to her.

The main premise is stunning in its originality (at least it is to me) - things have to be named repeatedly and be marked because otherwise they dissolve into some kind of goo: so a table has a sign saying "table", doors are labeled "door" and so on. Citizens have to be constantly vigilant lest they lose important possessions. This makes for an interesting social structure where nothing is permanent and in reaction everything is rigid and unchanging. Karin Tidbeck uses this disorienting juxtaposition to paint a very vivid picture of the world she created. I absolutely adored this part.

The characters on the other hand never truly came alive for me. Their reactions are always left mostly unexplained and I had a hard time connecting with them. Especially the love story between Vanja and Nina made very little sense to me - and I never understood what they d about each other and what made Vanja especially abandon her previous life with hardly any second thoughts.

Ultimately, I think this book works best if you study it and analyse it and discuss it with others. There are so many layers that could be talked about and so much to think about, that a casual reading does not do it justice. As it stands, it kept me at arm's length and I never felt fully engaged with the characters.

___
I received an arc of this book curtesy of NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for that!arc dystopia sci-fi114 s ?Misericordia? ?????? ????2,477 19.1k

A trippy, hopelessly empty-ish world populated with people seemingly shambling through their lives without purpose and, mostly, dignity. They get words and goop, if they misuse the words.

Very reminding of Zamuatin's We, of Orwell's 1984. Though, this one was libeerally sprinkled with feminist and diversity vibes. And, it felt a lot more depressing than the prototypes. I sort of want to unread this novel. Sadly, I can't.

Q:
Is there something behind the gray of our sky? (c)
Q:
IÂ’m thinking I might take the gag off, Vanja. Otherwise itÂ’ll be hard for us to talk. (c)
Q:
WeÂ’re a finite population in a world we donÂ’t really understand. We struggle endlessly to maintain order. That struggle entails a society with strict rules. (c)
Q:
“Pencil-pencil-pencil-pen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen—”
The last pencil in the row shuddered. As Vanja bent closer to look, the shiny yellow surface whitened and buckled. Then, suddenly and soundlessly, it collapsed into a pencil-shaped strip of gloop. Vanja instinctively shrank back. Her stomach turned. She had done it. She had said the wrong name, and the pencil had lost its shape. It shouldnÂ’t have happened that quickly. ...
“Pencil,” Vanja hissed at the gloop. “Pencil. Pencil. Pencil.” (c)
Q:
“If one doesn’t want to have children. One waits, and sort of hopes that it doesn’t have to happen. And then one turns twenty-five, and the questions start coming, and they put you in a room with a counselor who explains that it’s one’s communal duty, and finally one gives in, one goes to the fert unit and shakes hands with some pitiful man who has to masturbate into a cup so the doctors have something to impregnate one with, and one resigns and puts one’s feet in the stirrups because one has. No. Choice.” (c)71 s BradleyAuthor 4 books4,351

This one is a hard one to review without giving away certain discoverable plot twists except to say... what a surreal, surreal world.

I think it's a mild New Strange. Or perhaps it's a hardcore Magical Realism. Perhaps it's just a study in what it means to use imagination when surrounded by literalism. Maybe it's a whole society built on the necessity of crushing that imagination in all ways. Maybe it's a necessity. And maybe we're in bizarro commune land brushing its fingertips against 1984.

And maybe it's a love story. With mushrooms.

I said, it's hard to describe without giving it all away, and yet it's still a gentle dip into the whole stranger in a strange land, firmly rooted in banality until it's suddenly far, far from banal. :)

I enjoyed it. It made me scratch my head and just go with the strange. Mild strange, slowly getting very, very weird. What can I say? I y. :)
2018-shelf fantasy sci-fi42 s BJ162 120

Precise, necessary—Berols’ Anna’s About Plant House 3 is a curious book of poetry indeed. It’s been said that “in Berols’ Anna’s poetry, all things became completely and self-evidently solid.” And yet, on further reflection, all that is solid melts into air. Describing a complete year in the life of Plant House 3, from harvest to harvest, this celebrated collection from Amatka’s greatest poet is, in fact, a radical act of creation: for within the mundane happenings of Plant House 3—“among the beets” and “the long furrows   of chalky earth”—lies the peril, and promise, of a world.

About Plant House 3—though presumably less riveting than the far more popular About Plant House 5—belongs among the great fictional books. so many of the precise details in Amatka, it takes on new meaning as Tidbeck’s story unfolds. Considering Berols’ Anna’s challenge—to describe plainly what is true and real, and, at the same time, to describe new worlds’ into being—captures as well as anything the strange duality of fiction itself.

Amatka is science fiction of the first order—subtle, philosophically rich, frequently disarming. Indeterminate, charged with sorrow and hope. Tidbeck eschews easy answers. Offers no clean parable of our own world. Challenges at every turn.favorites-read-after-2021 queer scandinavian ...more38 s Tatiana1,449 11.5k

I didn't think I would another dystopia any time soon, but here I am. This was pretty good.

I am not surprised to learn this novel was written by a Swedish writer, because the basis of this story is deeply rooted in the pipe dream of perfect socialism, you know, total gender and class equality and adherence to group needs at the expense of individual. I am not trying to disparage Scandinavian socialism, I am all for it. The dystopia of this world is the theoretical socialism, the type I personally learned from early Soviet movies and fiction filled to the brim with propaganda. Even approved poetry in this story reminded me of the Soviet wordsmith Vladimir Mayakovsky. The ideal of communal living and sacrificing for the community's good never worked in real life, it doesn't in Amatka. After reading the ending a couple of times (it is a tad vague), I am not sure if the revolution was the right choice though (not enough information, only time will tell, I guess).

To me, the science fiction angle wasn't that interesting (the alien gloop thing was done better in Solaris), but the depiction of the conflict between personal and societal good is quite stark here. As is the power of naming things. 2019 dystopias-post-apocalyptic foreign-lands ...more38 s Gary442 208

People often conflate pity with sympathy. Both words may refer, superficially, to a feeling of compassion for another’s misfortune; contextually, they can have radically different uses. Sympathy more often carries with it some notion of equity – it asks that compassion be born of justness, that understanding is earned because it is shared. Conversely, pity holds a note of condescension from the pitying, and a certain amount of solicitousness on the part of the pitied. Sympathy is meant to strengthen bonds between people; pity makes a spectacle of suffering and consolation, dividing us into spectators and subjects, widening the gap.
The cardinal sin of Amatka is that it makes its protagonist, Vanja, far more pitiable than sympathetic. The novel practically sobs her into existence. It is one thing to make a character an introvert, and quite another to bludgeon the reader with her reticence, to exhibit her meekness as a demand for empathy. But that is exactly what Karin Tidbeck does here.
The world of the novel is an interesting one, a place where language literally has the power to shape reality, so much so that things must be named repeatedly, or they will lose their form and turn into an ooze of noxious goo. As a result, the authorities exhibit an undue amount of control over the behavior of, and by extension the thoughts of, the citizens they police. Vanja dreams of a boot-free neck, with predictably tragic results.
I am usually fully on board for stories where systemic oppression is addressed, but in this case the “evil system” and “innocent victim” are codified in such absolute, unsubtle terms that it comes off as a jaundiced, writerly construction rather than a lived-in world. And lest you think I am mistaken in my estimation of how Vanja and this novel are meant to be read, the ending literally valorizes the woeful fawning of its hero, spelling it out in no uncertain terms. It is one thing to nudge a reader’s sympathies, and quite another to push them over a cliff.
31 s Jessica Woodbury1,715 2,472

This was my first exposure to Tidbeck. I knew nothing about her or the book before I started it. I had just gone on vacation and when I realized I was reading something rather bleak and Scandinavian I almost put it down. It didn't seem the right fit. But there was just enough weirdness in those early chapters to get me to stick around.

Dystopia is popular these days, and this is certainly a speculative dystopia. But I enjoyed it immensely. While reading it I kept commenting about it to my traveling companion, I spent the first third saying how I really didn't know what was happening and I wasn't sure how I felt. And then I spent the last third saying whoa it got really good and whoa what is even happening right now. It is rare to read a speculative novel that feels it's doing something different. Of course, it also reminded me of a lot of great early sci-fi, especially those set on a bleak and sparse Mars, which feels an awful lot the setting here in Amatka.

I don't want to tell you much at all about the society it's set in because finding all that out is part of the joy of reading it. And even when you feel you've got a pretty good handle on how things are run and you're wondering why you're reading a memo about the ingredients in soap products, you realize that there are a few little things that are just not quite right but you don't really know why yet. I kept reading for the answer to that why, and often when I've read a book that nags at me that the eventual reveal isn't worth the buildup. But not this time. That feeling that maybe you've got this figured out except still maybe not ends up leading to a few pivotal and crucial reveals about the world the book is set in that feel new and deep with meaning.

This is also not one of those let's-wrap-all-this-up-in-a-big-bow novels. It will not all be explained. It will not all make total sense. But the last few chapters leave a searing vision in your mind. If you're at all me you will talk about it for days. I really must find more Tidbeck.arc-provided-by-publisher best-2017-arcs in-translation ...more25 s Allison HurdAuthor 3 books836

So so glad I finally got to this. If you scifi and love language, this is a really good one to chew on. I love books that make me feel my thoughts are pop rocks, and this was one of them.

CONTENT WARNING: suicide, oppression, women-as-baby-factories, loss of a parent, some implied ableism

Things to love:

-The concept. This is a metaphor. It's poetry in prose. I wish I could read it in the original language, I bet it's beautiful. We're asked to think about how humans shape their world, and why. And of course the strong critique of the poles of extreme capitalism and extreme communism.

-The atmosphere. I love how this was drawn out with its eccentricities, its errors, its friendships and spooky visceral oppressiveness.

-The language. There was humor! There was beauty! And it all built into itself until the truth was inescapable.

Things that left me wanting:

-The romance. Listen, we all know, okay? I don't it. I especially don't it when two grown ass women go all Romeo and Juliet on each other. You're not in love, you orgasmed. ONE TIME. One fight and you sell each other out. I don't know what this added. Even in metaphor, I am trying to think and I can't get it to fit into the statements above.

-The end. Both rushed and muddled. It really killed the mood for me, no orgasm pun intended. It had a lot of good elements, but it felt they weren't stuck together any more. The story glue dissolved along with the essence of corporeality. Kind of fitting when I think of it that way, but I could see so many ways to achieve dissolution and resolution in one with this story.

Rating it 4 because I know I'll think about it, but the ending is a 2 for me, and I doubt I'll recommend it to many. This is high concept, high art, low plot.

fem-author lgbtqia-mc scifi ...more25 s Elizabeth (Plant Based Bride)484 5,877

If The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí was a book, it would be this one.

Bizarre, surreal, disorienting, bleak, and unsettling - Amatka by Karin Tidbeck explores the ways that language can shape the world (literally).

A dystopian society that is barely held together by tight control of the masses through policing of language and strict regulations, slowly dissolving into an unknowable muck.

A quick read, but an unforgettable one.



Trigger/content warnings: loss of a child/infant death, miscarriage, forced medical treatment, oppression, suicide

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PBB Book Club5-star-reads favs-2023 lgbtqia ...more21 s Gabi722 142

4.5 stars.

Currently I'm absolutely happy with my picks. This was another little jewel.
"Amatka" hits all the short-story-lover, overly-explaining-hater marks of my darker reader personality.

It is bleak, the characters are distant, there is no comfortable hand holding by the author, the end is completely open and certainly confusing. So I can see why some readers don't it. For me on the other hand these are all points that speak in favour of a novel. Of course there is a thin line between trusting the reader and trusting the reader too much (aka, leaving me with the feeling that I didn't get it at all), but Karin Tidbeck stays on the right side of the line.

Once I started listening to the audiobook (good performace by Kirsten Potter) there was no way I could take the earplugs out of my ears again. I was sucked into the weird strange world and concept from the very beginning and finished it in one go. My mind was racing, trying to fill in gaps in the narration, trying to figure out what was going on. All in all it felt a short story in novel-length

Readers who need a solution to their stories perhaps better stay away from this one. (Oh Â… and I would recommend to NOT read the summary on GR Â… as so often it gives away too much of the story, which was part of the pleasure for me to figure it out as I went along)

A novel of a different kind, and one that definitely makes me look up the author for further works.authors-nonus-nongb sff-group-shelf18 s DivaDiane SM1,029 102

3.75 stars.

What an interesting book! Words are reality in this world Karin Tidbeck created. And words are used to keep this world at bay and remain true to who they were when they arrived. But is this life really living?

I recommend this to people who weird that is barely explained.diane-s-meager-effort science-fiction sffbc-amazing-eights-diversity-chal ...more17 s Hank864 91

That was refreshingly weird. Sort of a blend of 1984, PKD and Scandanavian noir. Amatka is the city where the "action" takes place but the reader never really knows where Amatka is. We have things that apparently don't want to stay as things without some help. We have what looks an oppressive government bent on helping/controlling the population for the sake of survival and there is some flip flopping on the believableness of that.

I enjoyed all of the thoughts particularly the one where speech, writing and thinking can both bring something into being. I frequently feel our own lives follow that.

owned_kindle scifi-club-read tbr-clean-202316 s Ryan271 72

Was I promised weird? I thought I was promised weird? This wasn't weird (enough). I was hoping for Vita Nostra levels of quirkiness and mundanity, instead I got multiple servings of fried porridge.

Too real to be any kinda topia. Little in the way of hand holding. The kind of book that you read so you can talk to others about what it could mean.

Don't want to read it again so if it's ever selected as a BOTM here are some (more) hints to remind future Ryan of the story:

Odo
Adaptable sludge that if left to its own devices wouldn't bother taking a shape useful to others is exactly how I think of the native lifeforms on Amatka and the Changelings of my beloved Deep Space 9.

Magic of the social contract
One aspect of civilised life that I'm resigned to as events of the past decade has shown is how flimsy civilisation actually is. I feel Amatka explores this in a somewhat quirky way but by making this a story of colonising a different world few people besides myself will see that life on Earth works in a similar fashion. Without collective belief in things expertise, the general decency of the foreign other, and even money civilisation deteriorates. These mostly intangible things don't quite need the special attention that pencils of the world in Amatka do, but still. :/

Collective unimagination
In a world where you realise so much is possible its hard not to reflect on how unnecessarily drab this all this. The world of Amatka could do better in this regard too. *chortle*

I guess it shows the limits of the social contract that shared narratives have to stay fairly simple. A justification of the conservatism of the majority and perhaps an argument for appreciating the little things?

LGBT rep
Yay! Lesbians! Bisexuals(?)! But also, boo? The cover of my copy had what appears to be a production line of babies that made me think we were going to get an exploration of demands made of uterus havers. With the protagonist being attracted to women there was even more space to explore a world where reproduction was... well I was going to say 'as vital as ever' but that doesn't really say anything. Anyway, we didn't get any of that, which is one of the reasons I don't think of this story as Dystopic. The tone is rather downbeat but so am I when it's 35+ degrees centigrade outside without a breeze.

Princess Peach has a nasty rash

(Passing up on the 'mushroom kingdom' as a hint because it lacked sauce was certainly a choice)

None of this bothered me. As someone who made the mistake of watching the British show Embarrassing Bodies I'm half convinced everyone on this planet has a skin condition so there was no ick factor here for me. Except for in the beverage options.

Ableist?
I don't feel qualified to talk on the ableist ideas touched on/explored in this book as my memory of it is spotty.2020-sffbc-read aliens amazing-eights ...more15 s Netanella4,382 12

Amatka. Amatka. Amatka.

Are you still there?

Just finished reading this strange dystopian novel of soviet-infused communities built upon language and mushrooms. I'm not sure that I enjoyed the apocalyptic ending, and the fate of Vanya in the end, but then again, there's not much that's enjoyable in the lives of the Amatka's citizens, unless it's Anna's poetry series on plants or yellow coffee or filling out reports in triplicate. I understand this is the debut offering of author Karin Tidbeck, and as such, I am very impressed by the originality in its dark vision, and I look forward to more Tidbeck.2023-a-z-book-title-challenge 2023-ha-mount-tbr 2023-january-reading-challenges ...more14 s Para (wanderer)390 216

This was, I confess, a complete impulse read. I was idly browsing cheap ebooks and – hey, I’ve heard of this before. And it looks to be barely longer than a novella, too! Checking the preview, the strangeness of it all was incredibly compelling. I had to go back to it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Amatka is a strange book set in an even stranger, dystopian world. Every object has to be periodically re-inscribed with its name or it dissolves. In addition, people are under strict control to obey rules and any deviance or wanting the society to be different is horrifyingly punished. It makes for a creepy, unsettling combination (I was reading it before going to bed. This wasÂ…a bad decision.).

Vanja, our protagonist, is an information assistant, sent to the cold, distant colony of Amatka to see what kind of hygiene products the people there might need. After falling in love with her housemate Nina, she decides to stay, and along with her, we slowly discover why things are as they are.

The atmosphere of the book is gray and depressing and mastefully done. You can feel a sense of wrongness that intensifies with each new revelation, both about why the objects have to be marked and how the society functions. I haven’t seen many people label this book as horror, but I’m highly tempted to classify it as such regardless. It’s true that the characterisation is bland, but I thought that was part of the point – having a MC who is, in a way, completely alienated both from her world and herself mirrored the oppressive, eerie atmosphere well. Also, I have to say I always love it when a book includes bureaucracy and this one has bureaucracy aplenty.

The only thing I didnÂ’t was the ending, which was very much of the unsatisfying, literary type. Once again itÂ’s an ending where rationally, I can see it make perfect sense, but emotionally, I was far from satisfied. Still, if weird, creepy dystopias are your thing, this is the book for you.

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