First Saturday

Because I had the day off, today felt an awful lot like Saturday. So I’m pleasantly…well, not quite surprised, of course, but nonetheless pleased to “discover” that tomorrow is Saturday, “too.”

The Forgotten English word for today is “dollydaw,” meaning “one foolishly indulged,” which seems altogether apt.

It was a quiet day all told, and aside from a quick trip to the supermarket to pick up some cold cuts for lunch and milk for later, I spent it mostly just hanging around the house. I helped my father replace a light bulb on the stairs, then put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting stuff.

I also did a little reading, finishing Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which I can’t say I really loved. There’s a strong dystopian idea at the heart of the novel, and it has a lot of promise, but ultimately the world that Holmqvist creates felt very thinly sketched and unconvincing. I didn’t find the characters particularly compelling or believable, and I was much more intrigued by the idea of the book than its execution. I feel like Holmqvist kind of gets at the problem herself near the end of the novel:

My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start — though I say so myself. But a good start doesn’t go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.

I think there’s an intriguing novel to be built from the idea of rendering certain segments of the population “dispensable” — even segments that, conspicuously, mirror the author’s own biography — but this just wasn’t it for me. Maybe it was the translation, maybe it was having read it so soon after Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — by which this suffers considerably in comparison. Whatever the reason, despite its modest triumphs and moments, the book just ultimately felt underdeveloped and unconvincing.