Novel
Kallocain
Karin Boye · 1940
Opening lines
Den bok jag nu sätter mig ner att skriva måste verka meningslös på många – om jag alls vågar tänka mig, att ”många” får läsa den – eftersom jag alldeles självmant, utan någons order, börjar ett sådant arbete och ändå inte själv är riktigt på det klara med vad avsikten är.
The book I now sit down to write must seem meaningless to many (if I dare imagine at all that “many” will read it), since I begin such a work entirely of my own accord, on nobody's orders, and yet am not myself quite clear what its purpose is.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
In the World State, at permanent war with the neighbouring State, citizens, called comrade-soldiers, live underground, and in every dwelling a police eye and ear record everything. Leo Kall, a chemist in Chemistry City No. 4, married to Linda and father of three children, serves the State wholeheartedly. He develops a substance which, once injected, makes people confess their most secret thoughts. The first tests on volunteers reveal to him what lies beneath the loyalty of others, while he suspects Linda of taking an interest in his superior, Edo Rissen.
Context
The novel appeared from Bonnier in the autumn of 1940, as the war was spreading across Europe; it is presented as the autobiography that Leo Kall writes in prison, twenty years later. In September, the woman who had written it told a friend that it described the following century, in which great totalitarian states contend for the world, and it is linked to what she had seen in the Soviet Union and in the Germany of 1932-1933. Radio made a play of it in 1959, with Gunnar Björnstrand, and television a series in 1981. Translated into many languages, it appeared in English in 1966, and in French from Ombres in 1988, then in a new translation by Leo Dhayer in 2016.
Who it is for
A short novel, written in the first person, which can be read in Swedish, French or English. The dystopia here is more psychological than political.
Prizes and reception
His most widely read novel and, outside Sweden, his best-known work; it is ranked among the great dystopias of the century, alongside We, Brave New World and 1984.
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