Description
Description
A pioneering work of dystopian fiction from one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers Written midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Kallocain depicts a totalitarian 'World State' which seeks to crush the individual entirely. In this desolate, paranoid landscape of 'police eyes' and 'police ears', the obedient citizen and middle-ranking scientist Leo Kall discovers a drug that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. But can private thought really be obliterated? Karin Boye's chilling novel of creeping alienation shows the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance, no matter how futile. Translated with an introduction by David McDuff
About the Author
About the Author
Karin Boye (1900-1941) was a Swedish poet and anti-fascist who translated The Waste Land into Swedish. After undergoing psychoanalysis in Berlin, she left her husband and formed a lifelong relationship with another woman, Margot Hanel. Her most famous book, Kallocain, was partly inspired by eye-opening trips to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Boye died by suicide the year after writing it. David McDuff (translation and introduction) is the translator of the Penguin Classics editions of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, as well as Isaac Babel's short stories.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Thrilling . . . [It] mesmerizes. . . . Relationships are the true heart of Kallocain how intimacies shape us, how the presence of difference can free us, and how what is freely given between people is always so much more powerful and real than what is taken by force." --Ilana Masad, NPR "The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye's little-known 1940 novel, Kallocain, is a close cousin to those depicted in We and Brave New World. . . . The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in Kallocain it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state's power over its citizens and their own power to resist." --The New Yorker "A fascinating novel of the 1984 and Brave New World genre." --Library Journal
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Penguin Group
Pub date:
2023-06-06
Length:
192 pages
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