The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Kallocain, by Karin Boye, translated by Gustaf Lannestock
reviewed by Robert Buckeye

Karin Boye. Kallocain. Trans. Gustaf Lannestock. Intro. Richard B. Vowles. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 193 pp. Paper: $17.95.

The world is more like it is now than it ever was before, Dwight Eisenhower said late in his second term as president, and if that were less apparent when Swedish poet Karin Boye published Kallocain in 1940, shortly before her suicide, it has become more and more true with each successive publication of the novel in English in 1966, 1985, and 2002. This time Kallocain reads as if it were today’s news, not something written sixty years ago. Kallocain is the memoir of chemist Leo Kall, written in prison, and, like 1984, documents the control of a totalitarian state over its citizens. Kall had helped support the state through his invention of a drug, kallocain, which caused those injected with it to reveal their innermost thoughts. However, his success only increases his insecurity. It leads him to betray both his colleague and his wife, and he comes to understand that his life had not only been destructive but also indifferent. (His imprisonment under the new rulers, he notes, is little different from his freedom in the previous regime.) Boye had joined the international worker movement Clarté and in 1928 made a trip to Russia. She was disillusioned by what she saw and further disillusioned by a trip to Germany in 1932. Neither the East nor the West offered any possibility of human life, and Kallocain became the work, she wrote her publisher, that she had to do. Peter Weiss gives it a place of importance in The Aesthetics of Resistance as an exemplary act of resistance. “She anticipated all this destructive energy of the super powers,” he says, “which have rendered the individual human being totally powerless.” The longer we live today, the more Boye’s Kallocain or Marina Tsetaeva’s The Ratcatcher seem like texts of our time.