Kallocain by Karin Boye
Chemist Leo Kall lives in a dystopian society characterized by surveillance and propaganda. With his truth serum Kallocain, he provides the World State with a means of total control, but is plagued by an internal struggle over what is right and wrong. Kallocain is Karin Boye's last novel and her best known. The book addresses similar topics to George Orwell's classic 1984, but Kallocain was published nine years earlier.
An underground diary by Fjodor Dostoevsky
"I'm a sick person ... angry and mean. A disgusting man ”. So begins the story of the contemporary-hating diary writer in An Underground Diary, or Notes from a Basement Hole, which it was called when it was first published in Swedish in 1948. An orgy in anger and self-pity when a bitter former official isolates himself in the basement and puts his social contempt on print.
Doctor Glass by Hjalmar Söderberg
The lone doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas is depressed and longs to perform a great deed. This great act becomes a murder. Hjalmar Söderberg's classic contains one of Swedish literary history's perhaps best-known quotes. On July 11, Doctor Glas writes: “You want to be loved, lacked admired, lacked feared, lacked despised and despised. You want to initiate people some kind of feeling. The soul shakes at the void and wants contact at any price. "