Amatka: Karin Tidbeck

It took me a while to get into but once finished this mind-bender left a powerful imprint on my brain! I find it a bit tricky to really explain my feelings about this book except I wanted to give it five stars, it may not be for everyone, and that I look forward to Karin Tidbeck’s next novel. Proper science-fiction!

This book is really weird and I loved it.

I picked this Swedish book up because it sounded interesting, but strange, and short -- and I'm generally game for strange science-fiction, especially if it's not too big an investment of time. Within the early pages, the reader meets a young woman who is being sent from some kind of city or settlement to an outlying one, in order to conduct market research on hygiene products. This tundra-covered landscape contains only two other settlements, all connected by an antiquated rail line, and the cluster of four inhabited places constitute some kind of colony established by "pioneers" from our own world.The initial vibe I got from this very constrained and delineated world and its people reminded my Chirstopher Priest's 1970s book,  Inverted World . Here, all physical items must be named and labeled on a regular basis, less they disintegrate into a pool of viscous goo. There are no animals, and people subsist on a mushroom-based diet, all while adhering to the directives of the administrators. The heroine has never been happy with her life, and starts to pursue lines of thought seeded in her years ago by her father, that there must be something more to the past and the future. Her pursuits of this is mysterious and interesting up until the very end, when it isn't. It isn't, because this is not a story that's at all interested in resolution or answers. Like many readers and reviewers, I found myself impressed by the ideas and imagination at work, and very much underwhelmed at the end of it all.Readers who seek narrative closure and/or some kind of clarity should probably avoid this book. It's certainly possible to read and enjoy it at the level of allegory -- although it's far too slippery and clever to be hemmed into one particular reading. For example, you could see it as either a critique of communism (there are weekly communal festive nights where traditional pioneer songs are sung), or a critique of 21-st century extractive capitalism (the viscous goo everything is made of = petroleum). There's certainly plenty to say about mental health, or even gaslighting. But for me, that all has to lead somewhere, and instead the reader is left with a narrative that has dissolved into its own pool of goo.