But The Unit feels like an inversion of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where fertile women are forcibly impregnated under biblical sanction. Holmqvist wrote The Unit, she explains in an author’s note, after she turned 45, when it occurred to her that she was “completely dispensable,” and that her death would leave “no tangible empty space behind me that needed to be filled.” As a childless woman in a creative profession, she felt compelled to write about “how it felt to be regarded as a selfish, spoiled oddball who makes no contribution to any kind of growth.” The novel, first published in English in 2009, has been recently reissued, presumably to capitalize on the feverish interest in reproductive dystopias sparked by Hulu’s Emmy-nominated adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Holmqvist’s dystopia doesn’t emerge from autocracy but from widely held beliefs about the necessity of procreation, taken to an extreme. Though the idea for “biological reserve units” was first proposed by a fringe political party, she recalls, it soon “slipped into the manifestos of some of the bigger and more established parties,” and was ultimately passed by referendum. Dorrit reiterates over and over again that she lives in a democracy, where anyone has the right to express any opinion they want to.
“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. 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.Īnd 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. 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’s author, the Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, has imagined a society fixated on capital, but in human form. 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. 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. For the first time, Dorrit is surrounded by likeminded people and included rather than ostracized. 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. “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.
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