Naomi’s Reviews > Kallocain > Status Update

Ch.2”For no connection between the cities was permitted other than the official one, entrusted to the hands of sworn and strictly supervised…”

Ch.2”On the contrary, everything would be done to ensure that they quickly and easily became a part of their new surroundings and that before long they felt perfectly at home there. The similarity lay only in the fact that both parties knew with almost one hundred per cent certainty that they would never see one another again.“

Ch.2”Festivities of this kind always bore a certain resemblance to the banquets that are held for departing soldiers. True, there was one major difference: at events like this, everyone - both those who were going away and those who were staying behind - knew that not a hair of the heads of the young people who were leaving their home city would be harmed.“

“The occasion for all this was that a group of girls in the youth camp had received orders that they were to be transferred, no one really knew where. Some rumours said that it might be another chemistry city, others that it was one of the shoe cities, or at any rate a place where there was a deficit both in terms of labour force and of male versus female ratios.“

“She married a fellow writer but left her husband after undergoing psychoanalysis in Berlin and formed a lifelong relationship with a German woman, Margot Hanel. Boye’s most famous book, Kallocain (1940), was partly inspired by eye-opening trips to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. She died from an overdose of sleeping pills the year after writing the novel.” 😱😳⁉️

“As a young woman she joined the international socialist and pacifist organization Clarté and published her first volume of poetry while still in her early twenties. She translated T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Swedish in 1931, and wrote several novels throughout the decade.”

The author of this book is very interesting based off of the Penguin Classics blurb