Anyone familiar with myth knows that names have power. If you know the true name of something, you can control it—as Rumpelstiltskin learned to his sorrow. In the colonies of Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck, names have the power to shape reality. Names have so much power in the colonies, in fact, that if the residents don’t constantly tell things what they are that the things will dissolve into sludge if they’re not named frequently enough. They just know that this is the way things are. No one questions this, at least until Vanja arrived in the colony and starts to wonder.
Vanja has been sent from the big city to the freezing colony of Amatka with a strange task. Her job in the brutally depressing colony is to learn more about their hygiene habits so that her sisters company in Essre can sell them different soaps and products. Her job seems so decadently capitalist in a colony that seems to some straight from central casting’s idea of dreary communism. Supplies and information are limited. Jobs are assigned. Children are raised communally and only visit their birth parents on the weekends. Most people work in the mushroom farms, for cripes’ sake.
For such a short novel, Amatka is a surprisingly slow burn. It isn’t until about halfway through that the already tense conditions get worse. When good paper (paper that doesn’t break down like the mushroom-based stuff) is requisitioned and the archives are endangered, Vanja sees the colony start to collapse even as she tries to figure out why it’s necessary to name things. What if, she wonders, someone calls something by a different name? She was punished for mispronunciations when she was a child. Now that she’s an adult and no one is watching her, she starts to play around with names.
Amatka is a science fiction novel that is in love with words. One of Vanja’s allies is a librarian. A poet ends up playing a major part in the story. For all its uncanniness, I enjoyed it a lot. Throughout the book, I wondered about the power of a collection of sounds to assign a reality to something. What is a name except something that a language speaker invented for something? Linguists and some literary critics would argue that there’s nothing inherent in names, but in Amatka and the colonies, those names are the only thing keeping something sinister and chaotic at bay. There is so much food for thought contained in Amatka that it will keep readers chewing over its ideas for a long time.