Kallocain
The classic World War II–era dystopian novel, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and 1984, in its first new translation in more than fifty years
A Penguin Classic
Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye’s classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers…
$23.00
June 6, 2023
Karin Boye (1900-41), born in Sweden, was a 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 (1940), was partly inspired by eye-opening trips to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Boye committed suicide the year after writing the novel.
David McDuff's translations for Penguin Classics include Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, and Babel's short stories.