She Treads Softly: Amatka

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Amatka

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
Penguin Random House: 6/27/17
eBook review copy; 320 pages
ISBN-13: 9781101973950

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck is a highly recommended science fiction novel that explores the power of language; it is translated from the original Swedish.

Vanja lives in a world that has four surviving colonies from the original five. She is an information assistant living in the colony of Essre when she is sent by her company to Amatka. Once there she is supposed to survey the residents on their use of hygiene products and their need for new products and willingness to try new brands. Vanja is assigned to stay in a local house with only three other residents, Nina, Ivar, and Ulla.

Everything in this world is made of some kind of mushroom/fungus. All citizens in this weird world are required to mark and name all of their things or they will risk having the objects lose their shape and turn into a kind of sludge that must be cleaned up by a special crew. It seems that in Amatka, the citizens need to do this much more often than they do in Essre.

Amatka is also much colder than she expected and the residents seem to be monitored much more intently for any subversive activity. Vanja is only expecting to be in Amatka for a short time before she returns to Essre, so she concentrates on doing her job. While doing so she notices that something seems a bit strange with the residents, and the truth about some mysterious events are not discussed.

This is a rather odd novel that immediately brought to mind Jeff VanderMeer's fungus-laden Ambergris novels (City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, and Finch), as mushrooms seem to play an important role in Amatka too. With a translated version it's difficult to know if some of the oddness is from the translation or the writing. Certainly Tidbeck does not explain everything that is happening and some of what you will come away with is supposition based on what you think you know.

Dystopian, sure, but much more science fiction as it is set in a different world that has been colonized. The colonies seem to be based on a Soviet-style system, but other than that little is explained about how these people arrived in this world. The naming of things or writing down their names could lead to all sorts of questions about controlling our environment and the meaning behind language. This is an interesting novel, but not likely for a wide audience.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.