Burnout is nothing new. Just ask Henry David Thoreau, who moved in 1854 that our lives were “wasted in detail”. The smartphone can then be unimaginable – Alexander Graham Bell was barely out of early childhood – but the impulse to be reached was already there. “Barely a man takes a nap of half an hour after dinner, but when he wakes up, he looked up and asks:” What is the news? “As if the rest of humanity had held its sentries.”
Thoreau's solution? “Simplify, simplify.” For two years, as whoever read “Walden” read it, he took him to the woods “to live deliberately” and alone – despite the fact that his personal desert was only a mile and a half of concord, mass., And he always sent his laundry.
When we meet Emelie, the sometimes narrator of Annika Northern's first novel, “The Colony”, she has already become full Thoreau. Modern urban life – “stores and cars and lights, and screens, screens, screens” – has become too much. She was once proud, in her temporary jobs and her social life, on her reliability: “First, I stayed late, then I got out. I went to football matches, players, celebrations, gymnasium. I drank cocktails in bars, I sank, I joined book clubs. ” But hyperactivity has wreaked havoc, and one day she finds herself unable to get out of bed. So, she traces in the north of the Swedish countryside, where she throws her iPhone in a lake and settles down to enjoy the din of silence.
But Emelie is not alone. Shortly after the start of her isolation, she spies on the title “colony”, a group of seven of seven, to eat and to bathe and to bathe and to bathe. We will discover that they have been there for 15 years. But can their off-network idysel survive the arrival of a “foreigner”?
“The Colony” was a feeling of successful prices in Sweden, where author has had a long career as a pop star. At first glance, the appeal of the book to an American audience is obvious. The search for meaning, authenticity and adventure in the desert is a great American trope. Canon, not only Thoreau, but also Ismaël de Melville sought a scene change when life has become too much; More recent examples could include Chris McCandless in “Into the Wild” and the Cheryl Memoirs moved away. These works generally offer socio -political comments as well as fishing and sleeping bags – and “the colony” is not different.
Norlin is the book with ideas of his own broad reading. We are told that Sara, the de facto chief of the colony, finds inspiration both in Thoreau and Arne næsThe Norwegian philosopher whose ideas on “deep ecology” have given birth to the idea that humans should be taken into account at a level with any other species. (It is worth noting that Næss also used to retire in the desert – although her Walden pond was a cabin on the side of the mountain.) Sara also reads Pentti Linkola, a more extreme thinker sometimes linked to Ecofascist ideas Regarding radical depopulation, although Norlin does not provide much brilliant if you are not up to date on your Finnish environmentalists.
The fact that the book does not correctly explore one of these ideas is a major gap. Indeed, Nortlin spends so long on stories for individual members of the colony and their practical reasons to seek isolation that there is not only less space but less narrative necessity for them to share a philosophy. Three of them have a good reason to fear the law; The seven are accomplices of fraud with social benefits. The youngest, the lugubrious teenager Låke, was born from the grid and has no identity, legally speaking. It is ultimately less ideology than the intrigue that links the members of the colony. Contra Thoreau, they all seem less interested in life deliberately than to deliberately avoid life.
What remains is a group of misdeeds with time and space to think without distraction but strangely satisfied not to disturb. The low intensity of the dialogue and the debate is confusing, especially given the first signs of dissatisfaction that Norlin carefully plants. When Sagne, who was entomologist before retiring in the woods, compares the group to a colony of ants, everyone seems to accept the nominal value of the superficial ability of his analogy. “Everyone has a task for the community,” said Sagne, “writes Norlin. “Everyone is necessary. No one should know everything.” Perhaps in these very narrow terms, the comparison works, but it is difficult to imagine that it would carry the type of productive control that the more extensive dialogue could have caused. What about the prodigious ants of ants? Their enormous and growing populations? Without such a dialogue, we simply have to believe that the colony is satisfied with its picking and breathing routines. Without a dialogue, there is not much to convince the reader – nothing but a Thoreau or a næss could say to add the rigor and the ballast to the rather fragile ethics of the colony. However, over time, we are told, the conversation is simply moving away.
Two characters are more finely drawn: Emelie, Chummy and self-deprecating, irritating but credible, and Låke, whose unique style we meet in the best and shortest chapters of the book. His eccentric voice in attenuation arrives fully formed during the first introduction: “We can feel it in our body, when summer begins to weigh. There are a lot of small clues around us! Now it's a high summer now, everything is in bloom. And when it is time, we will feel the call to return to our nest. ” Alice E. Olsson, in her English translation, locates a naive lyricism in the voice of this brilliant but not schooled boy, who learned the world of meager literature at hand: “Wuthering Heights”, “Flowers in the Attic”, Old Jackie Collins Novels.
If only the whole story had been told of the curious and flashing perspective of Låke, “The Colony” could have ended up saying more than saying, and the most eloquent for that. In the current state of things, the characterization is thin, the motivations are overdetermined and the endurance of the colony requires a suspense of too steep disbelief. Perhaps a different book, a better book could have been found if Norlin had followed the advice of Thoreau and simplified.
Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes on books, films and music.
