Hanna's Daughters, by Marianne Fredriksson

(Swedish titel: Anna. Hanna och Johanna) This is a history of three women, grandmother, mother and daughter, moving from 1870 - when Hanna is conceived - to the late 1980s, when Anna comes to terms with ageing and death. Hanna is Johanna's mother, Anna is Johanna's daughter. At the center is Hanna. Born in 1871, grandmother Hanna Broman is a woman of "sense and continuity," but her life is blighted when she is raped and impregnated by a cousin at the age of 12. She is stigmatized as 'whore', and her son as 'bastard'. Then, marriage to miller John Broman restores her honor and produces three additional children. Hanna survive to a great age, and her personality, forged in a hard school of life determines to a considerable extent the emotional careers of the descendants.

All three of these women are remarkable and fascinating. It is interesting to note how the grandmother's lifestyle differed from the grandaughter's although they still share a common thread. Constant and common themes in their lifes are love and loss, becoming strong though sacrifices, yielding to men and the hardships of running a household. Johanna, Hanna's daughter and an atheist-socialist, is contemptuous of her mother, whose life has been so deprived that she must learn about mirrors, indoor plumbing and electricity. And Johanna's daughter, Anna, who is a writer living in the concrete suburbs, hungering to understand her antecedents. Ultimately, Anna acknowledges that she cannot find "a way home" in her research about her family; instead, she discovers that everything about them is "full of contradictions."

In Hanna's Daughters, Marianne Fredriksson surveys the three women's lives from the perspective of Anna, who in an effort to understand her mother, gathers letters, diaries, and journals to read about her mother and grandmother's life. The life of the three women revolves around mother-daughter relationships and the path our lives take as a result of the decisions we make. And in telling the story, Anna also tells a social history of Sweden as well, of how it, during this period, progressed from being one of Europe's poorer nations, to its mid-century position of one of the continent's richest.

Marianne Fredriksson also charts the emancipation and liberation of women, a parallel upward movement without historical precedent. It is a story of progress. But even so, menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, giving birth, the menopause, ageing, dying - these basic biological facts of life will always impose themselves on women, bringing disruption and pain, and also the last two not excluded - satisfaction.

As well, Marianne Fredriksson portrays males with compassion and charity. They have been victims too. The portrait s of Ragnar, Hanna's bastard son who exerts so much charm on so many, and of Anna's selfish but feeling and morally principled husband are very sympathetic . A bestseller from 1994 , not only in the Scandinavian countries but elsewhere, Hanna 's Daughters is hypnotically readable, moving , authentic and rises to heights of poetry. A wonderful book that also brings much material for an understanding of Swedish society.

See also at amazon US, by Marianne Fredriksson, Simon's Family.. Or at amazon UK: Hanna's Daughters and Simon's Family: A Novel of Mothers and Sons

The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist

Ninni Holmqvist

Ninni Holmqvist was born in 1958. In 2010 she received the Ludvig Nordström prize for her short stories.

Bibliography

• Kostym, 1995 (short stories)
• Något av bestående karaktär, 1999 (short stories)
• Biroller, 2002 (short stories)
• Enhet, 2006 - The Unit, 2009

The Unit is the debut novel of Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist. She has previously published three collections of short stories, but this is the first time I have read her. I really liked the book – while the tale itself is dark, and to me quite disgusting and terrifying – the writing style is quiet, solemn, well-controlled, descriptive and at times relatively sparse, and the book has been excellently translated by Marlaine Delargy. The Unit is a dystopia set in a near future, and the writing style – and the humanity, passion and warmth - contrasts dramatically with the horrifying story Holmqvist tells, and the contrast makes the tale all the more gripping.

This is a novel that transcends genres; it could justifiably be labeled as science fiction, fantasy, or crime fiction. In many ways it is a Huxley-type or Orwellian dystopia – very, very scary.

The Unit is about a future Sweden where a utilitarian philosophy – to some extent mixed with aspects of the welfare state ideology that currently dominates in all the Scandinavian countries – has been carried to it’s extreme. Human beings are now viewed as valuable capital–they are biological material. They are blood, organs and tissue that can be recycled. And all who fall into the new social category of “dispensable” are moved into special facilities where they are tended and harvested.

Dorrit Weger, the main protagonist of The Unit, is a dispensable. On her fiftieth birthday she is picked up and checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. For male dispensables, the same thing happens at their sixtieth birthday. All contact with the world outside is shut off. For the world outside the institution, she has ceased to exist.

Dorrit gets a nicely furnished apartment, she gets to meet lots of people, she can use all sorts of recreation facilities at no cost, there are restaurants, theaters and much more available. Everything going on inside the institution is monitored – there are cameras and microphones everywhere – even in the bathroom there are three cameras. The people living in the Unit are now property of the State, and can do anything they want as long as they do not harm themselves – the property of the State.

Dorrit – like most humans – is adaptable. She makes and spends time with friends, engages in other people’s lives, and she shares in the pain when friends have operations to remove organs or are damaged as the result of medical experiments gone wrong. The dispensables are expected to participate in drug and psychological testing and donate their organs, one by one, until the time has come for the final donation. Like the others, Dorrit resigns herself to her fate, what else can she do? Then she meets a man, falls in love, and things turn upside down for her.

The Unit is a rich, terrifying novel full of understated themes– satire, ethics, human adaptability to circumstance, ideology, and so forth. However, there is little to no argument in the book – it is not a polemical book; it just tells a story. And the story it tells is haunting, compelling and very intriguing, full of believable characters, with interesting turns and twists, and told in excellent prose. I liked it a lot and I recommend it.

Praise:

"Holmqvist's spare prose interweaves the Unit's pleasures and cruelties with exquisite matter-of-factness, so that readers actually begin to wonder: On balance, is life better as a pampered lab bunny or as a lonely indigent? But then she turns the screw, presenting a set of events so miraculous and abominable that they literally made me gasp." - Marcela Valdes, The Washington Post

Links to books by Ninni Holmqvist at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.