Kallocain - [a novel]

Häftad bok. 2002.

Mycket gott skick. Translated into English by Gustaf Lannestock.
THIS IS A NOVEL of the future, profoundly sinister in its vision of a drab terror. Ironic and detached, the author shows us the totalitarian World-state through the eyes of a product of that state, scientist Leo Kall. Kall has invented a drug, kallocain, which denies the privacy of thought and is the final step towards the transmutation of the individual human being into a 'happy, healthy cell in the state organism." For, says Leo, "from thoughts and feelings, words and actions are born. How then could these thoughts and feelings belong to the individual? Doesn't the whole fellow-soldier belong to the state?
To whom should his thoughts and feelings belong then, if not to the state?" As the first-person record of Leo Kall, scientist, fellow-soldier too late disillusioned to undo his previous actions, Kallocain achieves a chilling power and veracity that place it among the finest novels to emerge from the strife-torn Europe of the twentieth century.
"A faithful translation, which preserves intact the grim impact and momentum of the narrative.... Karin Boye's first-hand observations of Nazi Germany in 1932 no doubt supplied her with the raw material for some features of a forbidding future State.... She expresses her poetic genius in the use of symbols and imagery." - Signe A. Rooth, Scandinavian Studies
KARIN BOYE (1900-1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist whose suicide in 1941 amid the shambles of a war-racked Europe reflects the fate of a whole generation of writers. Her first novel, Astarte, appeared in 1931.