Freedom, conformity and divided desire run through Karin Boye’s poetry and fiction. Kallocain is a dystopian novel narrated by a chemist who invents a truth serum for a totalitarian World State and gradually discovers how fear has shaped both public loyalty and private life. Boye’s poetry, including collections such as For the Sake of the Tree, moves through love, spiritual longing, conflict and self-division in a more compressed form. Her prose is clear and psychologically intense, while the poetry can be symbolic and formally controlled. The strongest shelf associations are Scandinavian modernism, dystopian fiction, queer literary history and twentieth-century Swedish poetry, especially for readers of Orwell and Zamyatin interested in earlier European anti-totalitarian fiction. Read more Less
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