Karin Tidbeck’s chilling novel Amatka takes place in a remote settlement where keeping inconvenient truths under wraps seems to be the main purpose of the ruling class (the “committee”). Amatka is an agricultural colony, situated near a frozen lake on the edge of the tundra. Cold and isolated, it is a place of hidden depths where little is as it seems. Vanja is sent there from her home colony of Essre on a research assignment, to question people about their hygiene practices and the products they use, with the aim of discovering new markets for the company that employs her. Vanja’s yawning indifference to her assignment is apparent. But she is inquisitive, attentive to detail, constantly seeking distraction. She is met at the train station by Nina, with whom she will be staying, and on the walk to their accommodations Nina points out factories and other facilities skirting the colony. Amatka’s economy is driven by agriculture, specifically mushrooms, which are grown and harvested in underground farms. The entire place strikes Vanja as gloomy and uninspiring, and, initially, she wants simply to complete her assignment and return home. But unexpectedly she and Nina connect, and soon Vanja is facing a life-changing decision. Vanja and Nina live in a technologically backward world where daily life is rigidly structured, where nothing is left to chance, where people allow faceless authorities to make basic life decisions on their behalf, where dissent and unorthodox behaviours, such as questioning the order of things, are not tolerated, and people are encouraged to report on one another. It is also a place where language has the power to either stabilize or alter reality. Vanja completes her assignment and submits her report, but as she meets more of Amatka’s citizens, senses among them a pervasive fear, and observes their downcast glances and unwillingness to talk, she becomes convinced that something is amiss. When a structural failure at one of the underground farms causes widespread alarm, raises questions and sets off a torrent of rumors, she is soon violating protocol by sneaking away from the colony at night in search of the key to a mystery. As a dissection of oppressive totalitarianism, Tidbeck’s novel is subtle. The mystery that Vanja is trying to solve is never explicitly spelled out. There are elements of the story that loom large, but their significance is not made clear. We follow Vanja on her explorations, but the meaning of what she discovers—for her and us—remains elusive; though we do learn that the fate awaiting her is not a pleasant one. Some readers will find this narrative haziness tantalizing; for others it will be frustrating. But, regardless, Amatka is a boldly imaginative, deeply unsettling novel that shines a glaring light on issues that only the wilfully blind among us cannot see burgeoning in our tumultuous 21-century. ( )

Amatka starts as a fairly rote dystopia, a grey society organized into a brutal collective due to scarcity and the punishing cold. Shades of [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #6)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1488213612s/18423.jpg|817527]. One little detail made in the beginning gets gradually more and more attention until it encompasses the mystery at the center of the novel and surreally transfigures, or perhaps liberates, the world.

Every object in Amatka is made out of the same identical grey gloop and be willed into existence for what it is. Objects must be marked: a toothbrush must be physically labeled as a toothbrush and this name said out loud, likewise spoons, doors, buildings, and so on. The commune's daily chores include the "marking song" where they systematically acknowledge the existence and names of everything they have. To forget to do this is to risk the collapse of the object back into its original state of grey goo-- an excellent little detail added is that this substance isn't merely gross but also psychically horrific and unsettling like a dead body or a religious blasphemy. Worse is if you call an object by the wrong name and create something indefinably wrong. This is such an amazing metaphor for the creative process; for the related tyrannies of language, culture, and symbolism; for neurosis and mental illness... personally I focused on the novelty of Saussure's langue as a literal dictatorship, but the sign of a great premise is that it can be interpreted in many ways.

So it was a remarkable turnaround. Just when I was sick of the unremarkable setting and beginning to get resigned to the possibility that this novel would let a great concept go to waste the book seemed to reach out, to sense my frustration and correct course. Furthermore it kept going; in the manner of Junji Ito Amatka takes the central idea and spins it to its logical, if absurd and horrific conclusion.

Although, of course, the conclusion isn't supposed to be horrific at all. Certainly disturbing but also just and good given the paradigm the novel presents. Language constrains ideas into arbitrary containers and so allows humans to handle them. Like wiring a bonsai tree it makes a growing thing manageable but also necessarily stunts it. This is why being bilingual is so important; Yuri Herrera says in his [b:Signs Preceding the End of the World|21535546|Signs Preceding the End of the World|Yuri Herrera|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398195367s/21535546.jpg|15089950] "if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things." Discovering a new way of understanding a concept like "fire" that has grown independently of your known etymologies or sign-systems is to discover something new entirely.

In Amatka the constraints apply to physical objects. This thing is a toothbrush, it is, it is, it is. For it to not be a toothbrush, to even forget that it is a toothbrush, is to literally risk everything melting away and society falling to pieces. But what if our constraints are wrong? What if they're arbitrary? What if they contain inherent contradictions and our slavish devotion to them blinds us to inevitable problems? What if a thing isn't a thing at all? What if a toothbrush is a key? What if a man is a woman? What is a person is many people? ( )

Like a crossover fanfiction between Solaris and We, though it lacks the sort of, I don't know, intellectual seriousness of those works. Tidbeck introduces a lot of interesting ideas but doesn't delve into the philosophical/political/psychological implications of those ideas, at least not with any real depth, which I wouldn't hold against her except that the world reminded me so much of Solaris—which obviously is more philosophically inclined than most science fiction.
Nonetheless, the mystery and horror aspects are, I think, both effective and novel, though Tidbeck takes her sweet time getting to them considering how short the whole thing is. In fact if the first half or so was cut, I'd like it a whole lot more—at first I was thinking I'd give up on tracking down Jagganath, her short story collection, but the second half drew me back in. We'll see—but I think the length did this one a disservice. ( )

This book was so good. A super fast read (only ~200 pages) but an incredibly rich world and beautiful story. ( )

Amatka is a dystopia with a whole lot in common with its famous forebears. We’ve got a micromanagerial socialist state à la Zamyatin or Orwell, rationing food and dismantling the nuclear family with a collective rearing system. We have characters whose names include numbers (never explained, so presumably just another depersonalizing device), familiar from many a science fiction yarn. Speaking of food, the numbingly bland, mushroom-based diet of Amatka’s inhabitants, combined with their ritual of “recycling” the deceased, puts the reader more than a little in mind of Soylent Green. We also touch on the preservational theme of A Canticle for Leibowitz or Mockingbird, the valorisation of old texts and prelapsarian knowledge. The aesthetic as a whole is overwhelmingly bleak, functional and joyless, and peculiarly Scandi — like an IKEA catalogue in monochrome. This is an observation, not a criticism — the world built here by Tidbeck ain’t no Disneyland, but it is quite convincing and an interesting place to stumble around for a few hours.

The big innovation is that (almost) everything in this world is manufactured out of a kind of grey goo, and will revert to sludge unless continually “marked”, verbally and in writing, with its name. Even book titles must directly reference the content of the book, so we get hilarious poetry collections called “About Plant House #3” and — the one that creased me up — “About Trains”. On one level we can read this as an assertion of the primacy and potency of language, or rather of nomenclature, but by the end I thought it meant the opposite of this — that objects and the material world are actually just as arbitrary as the world of sound and sign. It’s an ersatz world of mushroom porridge, mushroom coffee, where anything can substitute for anything else.

The story follows Vanya on a trip to Amatka, one of four “colonies” on an inimical alter-earth, to do market research (the first private enterprises having recently been permitted). There she falls in an anaemic kind of love with her host, Nina, and also finds herself drawn into a mystery which threatens to unpick the fabric of her tenuously-maintained reality. I found it quite slow going, but the denouement makes up for the preceding drabness with some satisfyingly apocalyptic events, albeit the opposite of conclusive, only serving to confuse matters even more. A strange book, very much in the Vandermeer (who seems to have sponsored the project) mould with its uncanniness, intriguing premise and total refusal to commit itself. ( )