Review: The Colony by Annika Norlin (LA Times)

Burnout’s nothing new. Just ask Henry David Thoreau, who was lamenting in 1854 that our lives are being “frittered away by detail.” The smartphone may then have been unimaginable — Alexander Graham Bell was barely out of infancy —yet the impulse to reach for it was already there. “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”

Thoreau’s solution? “Simplify, simplify.” For two years, as anyone who’s read “Walden” will know, he took himself off to the woods “to live deliberately” and alone — notwithstanding that his personal wilderness was only a mile and a half from Concord, Mass., and he still sent his laundry out.

When we meet Emelie, the sometime narrator of Annika Norlin’s debut novel, “The Colony,” she’s already gone full Thoreau. Modern city life — “the shops and the cars and the lights, and the screens, screens, screens” — has become too much. She’d once prided herself, in her temp jobs and social life, on her dependability: “First I stayed late, then I went out. I went to football games, to plays, to parties, to the gym. I drank cocktails at bars, went running, joined book clubs.” But hyperactivity has taken its toll, and one day she finds herself unable to get out of bed. So off she trots to the northern Swedish countryside, where she tosses her iPhone in a lake and settles in to enjoy the din of silence.

For the review in full, visit The Los Angeles Times.