Several months ago I was mailed a copy of The Unit for a review. I read it after a few weeks, and I have to apologize to the publisher for such a late review.

At first when I opened up the book, I wasn’t that impressed, but I changed my mind as I read it. It’s not the kind of book that I personally look for. I hardly read novels, and when I do it’s usually classics or a very small number of favorites that also tend to be older books. But for a novel, it does a good job in that it’s easy reading, follows an interesting story line, and raises interesting questions. It’s the kind of novel that I’d rather read, if I am to read a new novel. One thing that does stick out is that it doesn’t seem to be translated very well from the original language. It is translated fairly clearly (and I assume accurately), but the style of the writing (translated) just didn’t seem quite right.

The Unit is about a woman in her 50s who goes to a special institution (of the near-future) that is basically a “harvesting” plant for organs and body parts, only it’s built to be a luxurious and comfortable living place. The residents make friends with each other and receive free food, apartments and entertainment. She and her peers at the Unit are not there because of choice - they are there because they’re childless and poor - the world no longer needs them. They are not allowed to leave the closed community, which is apart from the rest of the world.

From time to time, residents make donations as needed, and then eventually they make their “final donations,” in which they obviously have gone to die and get all of their organs taken. The staff assures them that their donating is more noble than anything else, and they must give their organs up to others who are needed so that they can continue to contribute to society.

I don’t agree with a lot of the ideas the author has about the form in which people-becoming-objects will happen - it seems highly unlikely that if the government decides to harvest organs from their populace they will do so by having them live for free in a luxurious community. However, it is a picture of what is happening to some people now, under different circumstances. It does raise questions about human life and whether or not things like harvesting stem cells from babies could be right, or whether or not we should discount people because they’re old, or don’t have a typical life (IE, without family, kids and a well-paying job).

I didn’t think I was going to at the very beginning, but I read the whole book and I looked forward to getting to the next segment and finding out what would happen to the characters. If you need something to read on the plane, I recommend it, or if you want to just have some light reading involving deep topics.

I would not recommend it to very young readers for the brief sexual scenes described.

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, world