Kallocain by Karin Boye

For this event you need to book your spot (for free) via the Kungsholmens library website
https://biblioteket.stockholm.se/evenemang/classic-literature-bookclub-4

The real count of attendees is on the library website. You're welcome to bring your own fika.
We meet in the study room on the 2nd level of the library, ask staff if unsure.

Karin Boye was a prominent Swedish writer in the first half of the twentieth century. Outside of Sweden she is known primarily for her 1940 dystopian novel Kallocain.

From Goodreads: “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.”

There are several copies available at the Stockholm public library. SVT produced a miniseries in 1981; available (in Swedish) on SVT play.