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. ( )

I saw this book as a possibility for the september read on a bookclub and I liked it so much I decided to read it anyways, regardless if it got picked or not. Bad idea, very bad idea.
It starts pretty interesting, i wanted to know more about how the world worked and get to know the mc and Amatka itself. What I found was:
- characters with no depth and about whom I didn't really care or attached to,
- an unoriginal story with no redeeming qualities (you can tell me the same cliched story, but make it your own, add something new to the mix, make it interesing! this one didn't feel like it had any of that)
- slow pacing
- a very unsatifying ending.
Maybe I am being too harsh, but I've been reading a few dystopias lately that I've really enjoyed, and then reading this one felt very dissapointing. ( )