The Unit’s heroine, Dorrit, has chosen not to have children and thus “spill over like rising bread dough” at the book’s opening, Dorrit’s independence has just earned her incarceration in the Unit, a death camp puzzlingly replete with art galleries and gourmet restaurants where her individualism seems to lapse into passivity. The Unit uncannily echoes its organ-donation-dystopia predecessor, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) both imagine societies of extreme utilitarianism that plunder their margins for body parts, and both raise the prospect of art for art’s sake, and love for love’s, as weapons against such thinking. In The Unit, all childless women over fifty and childless men over sixty are classified as “dispensable” and removed to facilities where they take part in scientific experiments and eventually donate all of their organs to “needed” individuals. This is a dystopia for a shrinking country. Book Review: The Celtic Twilight by William Butler.Only a Scandinavian dystopia would unravel in a setting “furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors” such as “eggshell white.” And only a Scandinavian dystopia, perhaps, would see mandatory paternal leave as a slippery slope to compulsory childcare and then to compulsory parenthood and the criminalization of traditional gender roles.The father of the child makes his final organ donation the day after he learns of the pregnancy and Dorrit Wegner… bringing it into the world and giving it up for adoption because they are aware that a once dispensable can’t become a needed individual again without putting the entire system in question. Dorrit Wegner has more or less put up with her situation when fate has it that she meets the man of her life in the unit of all places and the impossible happens: at the age of fifty-one years she gets pregnant! The officials responsible for the unit are shocked and bewildered because nothing like it has ever happened before, but in the end they leave her the choice between donating the foetus or carrying the child to term, i.e.

Moreover, they are compulsory organ donors until it comes to the “final donation”, in other words until heart, lungs or another vital organ is removed to save a “needed” individual outside the unit. They serve as human guinea pigs subjected to all kinds of experiments, often cruel, useless or at least questionable ones.

In the unit “the dispensables” (thus the German title!) lead a life in luxury, but there’s an important hitch to it.

The unit holmqvist