by Leena Krohn
Eventually, winter sleep will come to the narrator as well. Tainaron is not just a place one visits; it is a way of being. If one dares to take up residence there, one cannot be immune to the forces of change.
As I came to the end of this novella, a sort of narrative began to emerge in my head. I found that, unconsciously, I’d begun striving to assign meaning to symbols; I was looking for the key to an allegory. In my mind I was building a story about an aging woman whose lover has died, or gone on before her to somewhere else; without him her world has become unfamiliar. Tainaron is a place she creates in her mind, while she grapples with her own mortality and prepares for the inevitable. Or perhaps Tainaron is a place between worlds, a spot to pause in the afterlife. But then, I willed myself to resist this impulse. The story is too universal; it doesn’t deserve to be contained to any one narrative, any one interpretation. It doesn’t ask to be measured.
Regardless, the three final letters cast doubt on the story as it has been told so far. Perhaps there is no such place as Tainaron. Perhaps there are no insects with souls (or perhaps there are no humans). Perhaps there has never been a lover to receive these letters. Or perhaps he has been there all along. Like the debate on the nature of the soul, I prefer to leave this story an open question.
Finally, our narrator begins her twenty-fifth letter with the following story:
Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realize that it was no more than a piece of rotten wood. Then, of course, he threw it away in disappointment.
I wonder why — already preparing to leave — he nevertheless crouched to seek once more the piece of branch he had thrown away. But how diligently and closely he had to examine it before he saw: it was a cloaked moth after all.
Look closely. Look again. This, I think, is Tainaron.
The Robot and the Ant: The Tales of Leena Krohn
The First Thirty Years 1970–2001
by Minna Jerrman
“I am the measure of all things,” says the City Surveyor. He is an important official who inherited his profession from his father. He measures the lengths of narrow streets and wide boulevards, the heights of lofty skyscrapers and, conscientiously, of diminutive buildings. His measuring instrument is his own body, what else. It is a perfect fit for the job: long, green, and flexible as a licorice whip. The City Surveyor’s days are busy, as there is always new work to be done. We are in Tainaron, after all, an imaginary city created by Leena Krohn.
My grandmother would have told Leena Krohn to stop talking nonsense, but luckily, Leena is an adult. She can tell all the tall tales she wants.
Imagination is not forbidden in Krohn’s stories, just the opposite in fact. Without imagination, the reader misses out on the richness of the experience, as Krohn’s books combine the inexplicable with tangible descriptions of reality. Even her novels are woven from overlapping, fragmentary snapshots, which each reader assembles into their own window to the world.
To pick up a book by Krohn is to leave your old, familiar life behind. Why is it so easy to get hooked on these stories? Because they merge wild mental edifices, philosophical knots, and touching human destinies. They take a stand on issues while also tickling your funny bone. They say what they have to say with measured turns of phrase, sparing, but charming.
In Krohn’s own words, “I combine fantasy and fact with lyrical expression while aspiring to clarity and accuracy.”
The Bold and the Not Beautiful
I wish I had an aunt who lives on the Moon. I would spend my holidays with her, making long expeditions across the lunar plains. I would hop on one foot on the Mare Imbrium. I would kick up dust driving a moon buggy. I would wave at the Earth.
Stories about people who would often be called village idiots, people who see or hear more than others do. Stories about unprejudiced children whose minds are open to the strangeness of their surroundings. Stories about time, telling us about future cities or about intimate moments from beyond history. Stories digging into the fundamental questions of life: mortality, morality, and the nature of reality.
All of this and much more can be found in Krohn’s books and the hundreds of stories contained therein. Most of Krohn’s works are on the short side, but are all the more heavy in content. When turning the last page of one of them, one is at best inspired to immediately turn back to the beginning and start again.
Krohn does not shy away from the ugly or the strange. Her characters are usually just ordinary people, or even people on the margins of society. Crotchety grannies rather than resplendent princesses, first-graders rather than professionals on fast-track career trajectories, substance abusers rather than health-food enthusiasts, shy bystanders rather than quick-tongued intellectuals.
My favorite must be the girl who vacations with her aunt on the Moon. Or perhaps it’s Inka, who floats three inches off the ground when she’s happy.
Krohn’s stories also often rely on the firm belief that children are not feeble minded, that they can be as sharp as any adult. Or really, that they are more observant, more willing to question received wisdom rather than take it as absolute truth. Their secret, you see, is that they haven’t lost touch with their imagination
On the other hand, Krohn’s stories also honor age and the wisdom it brings with it. Practical smarts that many forget amidst the daily rush.
A Yard’s Worth of Story in Everyone
“To write is to open your eyes to the inexplicability of people.”
(Krohn in Gustavelund, August 7th, 1995)
Krohn’s body of work is like a meadow full of ants. At first you think it’s impossible to tell them apart. All you see are legs, thoraces, and antennae. Yellowish and black ants, large and small ants.
To make sense of Krohn’s s ant farm, one has to divide it into four colonies: books for children, books for adults, stories for the young at heart, and the rest.
Black garden ants. Krohn started her writing career in the early 1970s with picture books and later with longer children’s books. They feature knee-high protagonists and generous use of illustration, often by her sister, Inari Krohn.
Termites. No pictures, but lots of text that makes you think. These are the distinguishing characteristics of Krohn’s adult books. The protagonists in these texts are usually grown-ups and the texts themselves are usually novels.
Leafcutter ants. Stories for the young at heart falling somewhere between adult and children’s books. Some of Krohn’s most original creations. The characters in these short story collections are often children, if not in age at least in imagination. The stories cover every subject between heaven and earth, but always with a (sometimes sticky) philosophical view. The stories are seasoned with illustrations, either by Leena Krohn herself or by her sister, Inari.
Carpenter ants and red ants. Finally come the rest. Poems, essays, and songs produced in great abundance over the years. Krohn wrote poems and songs during the 1960s and 1970s and then moved on to essays.
6–12–28
I tried to catch up on some sleep during the day, but it was no use. I kept thinking about how many numbers there are in Krohn’s books and about their regularity. 6, 12, 28. Something like that. Is there some secret meaning behind them? A pattern?12 . . . Not quite . . . The alarm clock interrupts my thoughts.
Reading Krohn’s texts can make you paranoid. No period is just a period any longer. The number of paragraphs in any given book is no longer a coincidence. No character’s name is just a name. You start finding meaning in everything.
Take the titles of the books, for instance. They often have a subtitle, like Umbra: A Glimpse of the Archive of Paradoxes or Pereat Mundus: A Novel of Sorts or Datura: A Delusion We All See.
Why such rambling names? The subtitles describe the blurring of borders, indefiniteness, that the work is not trying to give an exhausting account of the subject, but only glimpses here and there, the best parts. It is as if Krohn is ta
king her thumb and fudging the border between the book and the rest of the world.
It is not only the titles of the books that raise questions, the names of characters and locations do so as well. What is their connection to old beliefs and traditions? What about to real, breathing people?
Näkki and Mrs. Raa
Who has been sitting in my chair? Who has moved my kettle? Who has been drinking out of my cup? These questions escaped my lips before I realized: we had had visitors.
The Tabernacle, Tainaron, Babel. Näkki, Doña Quixote, Mrs. Raa. Krohn’s works are populated by a great many mythological characters. Some of them have been left in their original environment, but most have been transplanted to other, more fertile ground.
Of Krohn’s mythological tales, the novel Gold of Ophir (Oofiin kulta, 1987) is the most open to interpretation. In its pages roam the namesake of Latona, beloved of Zeus in Greek mythology; Mrs. Raa, a lady named for the ancient Egyptian sun god; and Babel, a man who speaks as bad gibberish as the builders of his namesake tower.
The events of the book are set in the Tabernacle. Though named for a temple from the Bible, in this story, it is a confused muddle of a building built next to a landfill and plays home to a motley crew of the narrator’s acquaintances.
The residents of the house represent different types of people, different ways of approaching reality. Pontanus is an alchemist who believes that there is life everywhere, and his goal is to distil the raw material of life. Another resident of the Tabernacle speaks one sentence all day in the hopes that it will eventually crystalize into a fleck of gold. The twenty-something Glass-Girl, for her part, is gnawed at by fear, which materializes as crushed glass that she must then sweep up.
Gold of Ophir is constructed in such a way that you could easily read its chapters in any order, and have a different experience with each different sequence. No matter what order you read the stories in, though, there at two themes lurking behind them all: respect for the diversity of life and finding one’s own meaning in life.
In this book, as in many others of Krohn’s books, you can find one of Krohn’s recurring symbols: peacock feathers, the ones that resemble an eye made of glittering colors. They symbolize life’s possibilities and happiness. As Krohn herself puts it, “As soon as the peacock turns, grasp the moment now. Take hold of its loveliest feather. Take with you the whole rainbow.”
Another book plumbing the well of old tales is Doña Quixote (1983), a collection of stories about city-dwellers and cities. Many of its stories are linked by the eponymous character, a female version of Don Quixote. Like her antecedent, she is chivalrous, self-sacrificing, humane, and eloquent.
Doña Quixote is a tall, thin, ascetically dressed woman who likes to walk along the Observatory Hill in Helsinki and fires off observations about life like a cannon. Her reputation as a listener and helper has spread far and wide, and she has a steady stream of people coming to her hoping to find relief for their unhappy existence. The depressed narrator also gets to know Doña, which brings some excitement into her life.
The city of Helsinki is examined from more than just Quixote’s perspective. In these short flashes, telephone booths and busses become exciting details in the cityscape, as if they had their own personalities. Krohn breathes life into these “glass lighthouses” and “wandering rooms” in the same way as the zoom on a camera does for its subjects.
The book’s main characters have their models in real life. The narrator is Leena Krohn and Doña Quixote is the poet Mirkka Rekola. Krohn has said that many of Doña’s lines originate from Rekola, including “I had a question in which I lived for a long time . . . And one day I remembered I had forgotten it. It had gone, and from that I knew that I had received an Answer.” Many of the events in the book are also based in real life, like the time that Krohn stepped on an injured sparrow.
Krohn was in the midst of a literary crisis when she first met Rekola. She wanted to take her writing in a completely different direction, but didn’t know where. Doña Quixote and Other Citizens: Portrait (Donna Quijote ja muita kaupunkilaisia. Muotokuva, 1983) was the result, and it is, indeed, very different in tone from Krohn’s prior work. Krohn has said that she aspired to a musical form in the book, to the liveliness and melancholy of Shakespearean era song.
It is true that Doña Quixote is at base a very melancholy and symbolic work. In its thirty snapshots, married couples drift apart, friends die, and sparrows are crushed underfoot. There is something very similar in the book’s message to that of Gold of Ophir: it is best to make the most of life. Or as Rekola, a.k.a. Quixote, puts it, “For mankind, nothing is ever enough. - - He asks for more, more and more. And then – oops! – he loses what he already had.”
Krohn’s third mythological book, Tales from the Waterline (Näkki. Kertomus vesirajasta, 1979), draws from Nordic folk tradition. The book is about a water spirit known for luring people into the depths, a näkki. Krohn seizes this piece of folklore with both hands and squeezes it for all its worth.
Finnish folklore holds that the näkki entices people, both beautiful maids and children, into the water and drowns them. In another version, this aquatic terror will also teach the secrets of music in exchange for the aspiring musician’s soul. In any case, the näkki has been considered a malevolent being.
Not so in Krohn’s book, in which a lonely young water spirit turns out to be more human than any of the other villagers. He rises to the surface for the first time one Midsummer and drives the women of the village wild with his skills at dancing and playing the accordion. The men of the village become jealous and want to lynch the naked, mute freak.
The näkki has a narrow escape. He takes the tanner’s beautiful daughter with him beneath the waves, where they live happily ever after in their aquatic home.
Is there such a thing as unnatural love? Is civilization a straightjacket or a boon? Krohn uses wit and folklore to handle a wide range of issues, such as the shunning of difference, tolerance, and the fine line between nature and the natural on the one hand and culture and civilization on the other.
Tales of the Waterline is written in the rich, expressive style of Krohn’s early work, with the prose perhaps even a little old-fashioned, as befits the setting and subject matter.
The Moon or an Anthill?
“To write is to rend the real from the ostensible. I cannot think of any more difficult task. It is a task that one will never succeed at. One can only fail better or worse.” (Krohn’s afterword to Tainaron, in Rapina 1989)
In Tainaron (1985), Leena Krohn has failed the best. The novel is her most stylistically flawless and harmonious publication. This is strange in and of itself, given that the book is made up of twenty-eight letters. Nevertheless, the gaps left between the text and the monologues of their writer mean that the text breathes, which leaves the gates open to numerous interpretations.
The first letter knocks the socks off the reader. It is set in an Alice in Wonderland-style flowery meadow, in which the flowers are as tall as a man and in which the atmosphere is oppressively passionate. This is the place where the residents of the city come on weekends to frolic with honey-laden flowers. The residents are rewarded with intoxicating pleasure, and the flowers get a free pollination.
The narrator is bewildered by the open display of debauchery. She is not interested in becoming better acquainted with Longhorn’s friend, Admiral, whom they meet covered head to toe in sticky pollen, nor with another man, who has been seduced by a violent flower. She even shudders at the fuzzy clumps of down that tickle her neck and the seeds that the wind sends shooting from their cramped pods. Though the whole weekend expedition is too much for her, she secretly wishes that she could one day bring the unnamed recipient of her letters to witness the same sights.
The other letters also describe the strange lives of insects, which are deceptively reminiscent of human activities. There is a strange cult that makes a burnt sacrifice every new moon. There are nocturnal Fireflies who enjoy
themselves in swarms, and Queen Bee, who cares for the wayward and takes memories in payment. There is also much to be read between the lines, as the letters reveal more about their writer and recipient than about the events they describe.
This book, too, is drawn from mythology. Tainaron is a rocky cape from Greek mythology which is the entrance to the road to the underworld. Krohn has said that she chose insects as the characters, because they are as alien to humans as possible. We often look at other people with as little familiarity as we would have for grasshoppers and mosquitoes.
In Tainaron, Krohn has achieved something textually quite novel and beautiful in its simplicity: an intense atmosphere and an air of mystery. Every word and sentence—“the silky glimmer of the flowers” and “corymbs veiled by a downy web”—has been given thorough consideration. Little wonder, as Krohn wrote the book over the course of two years, after it got its start as a fantasy short story commissioned by a daily newspaper.
Tainaron is also Krohn’s own favorite. She has described it as her most “intense” work, and the one that is “closest to poetry.” It is difficult to argue with these claims.
“Some change imperceptibly, little by little, others quickly and once and for all, but everyone changes . . . ”
Tainaron is, indeed, a book about change and metamorphosis. Krohn deals with the same theme from the perspective of making choices and the maturation that follows them in the collection Secrets (Salaisuuksia, 1992). The five strange stories contained in the book are told from the perspective of children. The collection’s most impressive story is also the longest: “Mare Serenitatis,” a celebration of the Moon.