Amatka

So I thought this was excellent but I'm not sure how widely I'd recommend it. It's a quiet, odd, unsettling dystopian novel - my first from Swedish author Karin Tidbeck - that opens up more questions than it answers. Pair this with the ambiguous ending and I can easily see why some readers might fee Leggi tutto

A trippy, hopelessly empty-ish world populated with people seemingly shambling through their lives without purpose and, mostly, dignity. They get words and goop, if they misuse the words. Very reminding of Zamuatin's We, of Orwell's 1984. Though, this one was libeerally sprinkled with feminist and di Leggi tutto

This one is a hard one to review without giving away certain discoverable plot twists except to say... what a surreal, surreal world. I think it's a mild New Strange. Or perhaps it's a hardcore Magical Realism. Perhaps it's just a study in what it means to use imagination when surrounded by literalis Leggi tutto

Precise, necessary—Berols’ Anna’s About Plant House 3 is a curious book of poetry indeed. It’s been said that “in Berols’ Anna’s poetry, all things became completely and self-evidently solid.” And yet, on further reflection, all that is solid melts into air. Describing a complete year in the life of Leggi tutto

People often conflate pity with sympathy. Both words may refer, superficially, to a feeling of compassion for another’s misfortune; contextually, they can have radically different uses. Sympathy more often carries with it some notion of equity – it asks that compassion be born of justness, that unde Leggi tutto

This was my first exposure to Tidbeck. I knew nothing about her or the book before I started it. I had just gone on vacation and when I realized I was reading something rather bleak and Scandinavian I almost put it down. It didn't seem like the right fit. But there was just enough weirdness in those Leggi tutto

So so glad I finally got to this. If you like scifi and love language, this is a really good one to chew on. I love books that make me feel like my thoughts are pop rocks, and this was one of them. CONTENT WARNING: (view spoiler) [ suicide, oppression, women-as-baby-factories, loss of a parent, some implied ableism (hide spoiler)] Leggi tutto

If The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí was a book, it would be this one. Bizarre, surreal, disorienting, bleak, and unsettling - Amatka by Karin Tidbeck explores the ways that language can shape the world (literally). A dystopian society that is barely held together by t Leggi tutto