Thoughts on Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

This blog post contains spoilers! Please go read Amatka if you haven’t already. The post also contains themes of grief and loss.

I first read Amatka about a year ago. It had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while after I got it at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, MN. It was on sale, and I’m always looking for queer (especially sapphic) sci-fi to read, so I picked it out, but didn’t get around to reading it right away, as often happens.

When I first read the book, I loved it. Amatka follows a woman named Vanja as she moves to to the cold, harsh colony of Amatka on a work assignment. While there, she falls in love with her housemate, and decides to quit her job and move to the colony. The world of Amatka is literally shaped by language, words combining with a mysterious substance to create buildings, tools, clothes, and more. The longer Vanja stays in Amatka, the more she begins to uncover the colony’s secret history and question the government’s control of its citizens.

Overall, Amatka is an excellent queer dystopian sci-fi story. It’s also a pretty quick read, but it packs a big punch.

The second time I read Amatka, I listened to the audiobook, which I really enjoyed. I listened to most of it on and off for a while, and then finished it on the last day of my hold from the libary. The day I finished listening to it also happened to be the day I found out a good friend of mine had died. After spending a grief-filled morning with friends, classmates, and instructors, I took myself out on a light hike to think and breathe. As I did, I listened to the end of Amatka, and a few things stood out to me more than they had the first time I read the book.

Obviously, the part in the story when Ivar kills himself struck me a lot harder than it had the first time around. It’s a tragic moment, made more so by fresh grief.

Another thing I thought about a lot more was the ending, and the way the people transform. There was a quote that stuck out to me a lot.

“We’ve given ourselves over to the world.”

I found this part of the story oddly comforting, when the characters embrace language and the world and transform into new beings. They break apart their society, shape it into something new, and really highlight the impermanent nature of the world and themselves. I thought about my friend, transforming into something new, and leaving this world, and I thought of myself and the others with me, all transforming into the people that we’re meant to be as time goes on.

In Amatka, nearly everyone becomes these new beings, except for Vanja, the protagonist. She is left in her previous state, changed, but not in the way everyone else is. Still, the others carry her with them. Even though she can’t quite be one of them anymore, she is still a part of them, and acompanies them on their journey. I thought of my friend, changing and leaving us, and though the rest of us were still here, I thought perhaps he carried a piece of us wherever he was. Those of us still on Earth, we were transformed too, and though in a lot of ways we had to leave him behind, we still carry him with us every day.

Eventually, we all give ourselves over to the world.