Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (103 page)

APPENDIX

On ‘Tainaron’
by Matthew Cheney

Q: Since
Tainaron
is one of your only books to be translated into English, English-language readers can’t really know how it fits in to your work as a whole. Is
Tainaron
typical of your writing in its style and subject matter, or is it different from your other work?

A: In some respects
Tainaron
is typical, in others unique. For instance I always build my novels from short chapters (the letters in
Tainaron
), which often can be read as independent short prose. And I have written about the life of insects and animals (artificial life, too) both before and after
Tainaron.

Yet,
Tainaron
is perhaps the work nearest to me. My whole philosophy of life is in there. But as I have grown older, my voice is no longer so gentle and lyrical.
Tainaron
is at the same time allegorical and realistic (in its entomological details). My later works like
Pereat Mundus: A Sort-Of Novel,
and
Unelmakuolema
(”Dreamdeath”) are satires about our own shattering, absurd world.

—Leena Krohn, in an interview with Matthew Cheney,
SF Site,
February 2005

Great tomes have been written by writers whose single, impossible ambition was to capture all of life. And then there are writers of short stories like Anton Chekhov or Jorge Luis Borges or Grace Paley, writers who capture the essence of life with only a few pages, a few perfect details, a few words that sink deeper into our imaginations than hundreds of pages by other writers – and we discover that literature does not need to be voluminous to catch the substance of life’s infinity. The great babbling blurt of a doorstopping novel may miss more life than the intense whisper of a fable.

More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities. Leena Krohn’s short “sort-of novel”
Tainaron
is a book that I prefer to various massive novels of erudition and insight, a book that feels like it expands within my consciousness rather than a book I have to squeeze into the cluttered space of my cranium.

All of which is just to say that Leena Krohn has, with a slim volume of thirty letters written from an imaginary city of insects, given us a lens of words through which to consider reality, a microscope to reveal yearning and wonder, a telescope to look for what it means to be human, a window and a mirror and an eye other than our own. Sometimes it is best to use fantasy to imagine our way back to where we actually are.

Here, let me read to you:

Some of [the citizens of Tainaron] carry their innermost apartment, a one-roomed flat which fits their dimensions like a glove, with them everywhere. But this has the drawback that one cannot always make sense of what they say, for it echoes and reverberates from the walls of their private apartments. It is also vexing to me that I cannot always tell where the dwelling ends and its inhabitant begins.

Poor things, who never come among people without this innermost shield. It reflects the terrible vulnerability of their lives. Their little home may be made of the most diverse ingredients: grains of sand, bark, straw, clay, leaves . . . . But it protects them better than others are protected by armour, from every direction, and it is a direct continuation of themselves, much more so than clothes are to you or me. But if it is taken away from them, they die – perhaps simply of shame, perhaps because their skins are too soft for the outside air, or because they do not have skin at all.

It’s a beautiful, sad image, is it not? People who carry home so close to themselves that their voices are muffled and they can die from exposure, from having the armor of where they live torn away so that they are nakedly alienated from the place where they belong. But Krohn doesn’t stop there, no, she continues and lets the imagery expand beyond any simple metaphor:

Who would be so cruel as to tear from them this last shield! Oh, I have heard that such things, too, happen here in Tainaron; I have been startled by the moans of death-throes in the deeps of the night.

But I have my own theory concerning why this happens. For, you see, those who constantly drag their houses with them remain unknown to other people. One can gain only a brief glimpse of them, if that; they are always in hiding.

The idea grows roots and tentacles, particularly if you remember that the narrator, the writer of the letters, is a human who has come to visit the city, that the letters are written to the human home far across the sea, and so far there has been no response.

We learn through this fantasy as much about the narrator as about the city, and the two entities entwine, they grow and reflect from each other, until the city is an extension of the narrator’s psyche and the narrator is one piece of the city’s mysterious mind.

But we’re not done yet, because there is one more paragraph to this particular letter, and it adds depth to something already so deep as to be nearly unfathomable:

And then there are those who cannot bear such a situation, those who wish to see everything face to face and to reveal, open, show the whole world the nakedness of things . . . . Now and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to them, and they split open the house of some poor unfortunate. I awake to shrieking, sigh and turn over – and soon fall asleep again.

If I were in an even more grandiloquent mood than I already am, I would say that that paragraph contains all the contradictions, glories, and evils of humanity. Instead, I will simply say that all I have quoted here is but one example of what makes Leena Krohn such a truly great writer. She uses fantastic events, situations, and images, yes, but not merely for the pleasures inherent in oddity.
Tainaron
resonates because its words fuse imagination with many possible meanings, allowing the book a weight far beyond its few pages, its thirty short tales.

In one of the letters, the narrator tells of a trip with a guide named Longhorn to an observation tower on a hill above Tainaron. As they look out over the whole of the city, Longhorn says, “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps. It would be a waste of time and effort. Do you understand now?”

Tainaron
the book cannot be mapped any more than Tainaron the city could be, because with each reading it changes, and with each reader. It is not a single story, but rather a conglomeration of stories whose borders blend into each other, whose words echo other words, until the book becomes a harmony in the reader’s mind, a suggestion of even more stories than the ones told on the pages.

Tainaron
ends with impending hibernation, a stasis that promises regeneration. The reader who can resist returning to the first page and starting all over again is stronger than I, because within the words that create Leena Krohn’s imaginary city, rereading is its own rebirth.

Q: You said that your whole philosophy of life is in
Tainaron.
The philosophy that I most noticed while reading was that of the cyclical nature of life – the continuing cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. Is that what you meant, or were you thinking of something else as your philosophy?

A: I wrote in
Tribar
that logically impossible constructions lie at the bottom of our society. They consist of material and immaterial things, true and not true, rational and irrational. I call them “tribars” (the term is physicist Roger Penrose’s). I talk about “false” connections, where realities of different levels join into some kind of hybrid phenomena.

Fiction and so-called reality live in an odd symbiosis. Our civilization is not based on any rational fundament. Let’s think about money, for instance. We think it as something material, but alas! – what else is as speculative, as illusionistic, as liable to metamorphoses as money? What is “real”money? Not banknotes or coins, which are only images of money, not even digital conditions. Money is a phantom phenomenon; it’s about our speculations of the future, our dreams of security. They are real, or “real” (you choose).

Tainaron is a distant place that reminds us of every place in the world in its plasticity, strangeness, frightfulness. But its properties are the properties of our own heart.

This essay has been adapted and revised from a review of
Tainaron
originally published by
SF Site
in 2005:

www.sfsite.com/03b/ta196.htm

and an interview with Leena Krohn at
SF Site
in February 2005:

www.sfsite.com/03b/lk196.htm

Change and Transformation in ‘Tainaron’
by Desirina Boskovich

Tainaron
is the kind of work that defies classification or description. There are a few things that we may say definitively about it (and only a few things). First, it is a novella narrated through a series of thirty letters. These letters remain unanswered, so we see the story through the eyes of the nameless letter-writer alone. Her topic is her travels through Tainaron, an unfamiliar city peopled by sapient insects. (We might call them insects with souls.)

Each letter is a self-contained slice of life, blending observation and introspection. Most describe a single incident, experience or conversation. Each one further illuminates the nature of life in the city. In this fragmented fashion, the letters slowly build on one another, revealing the novella’s larger arc. The structure is reminiscent of
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino or
Einstein’s Dreams
by Alan Lightman, with a crucial difference: while both of those books devote each short chapter to describing the circumstances of a unique world,
Tainaron
focuses exclusively on its one eponymous city. And yet, in its fluid and fluctuating nature, Tainaron the city seems to encompass many worlds itself. At any rate, the effect is similar. Scenes of increasing surrealism paint a picture of a place that, despite its weirdness, begins to look surprisingly like home.

What, and where, is Tainaron? It’s a city, like any other: it has its desirable neighborhoods and its slums, its streets and shops, its social structures. It’s home to “vanishing spires of cathedrals, the liquid gold of the cupolas of minarets, and the pure capitals of a Doric temple.” It is a great melting pot and a diverse ecosystem, where strange persons of all kinds live and work together. Sometimes, their insect nature is quite apparent; at other times they seem quite human. (Miss Pumilio, for example — the frail old lady who lives above the narrator in her first home in Tainaron — does not seem to be an insect at all.) Tainaron is located at the edge of a vast body of water called Oceanos, which separates the narrator from her native city. Apparently, Tainaron is also located in a volcanic zone; scientists warn of possible destruction.

It’s a city, like any other, but it’s also a way of being, or a way of seeing. In the twelfth letter, our narrator writes, “ . . . suddenly the earth gave way beneath my feet and I remembered once more that beneath Tainaron is nothing but a crust, as insubstantial as one night’s ice.” Something about Tainaron is fleeting and fragile: like a paradigm or a metaphor, it is upheld only through belief. The city’s emblem is the Ferris wheel. “Ferris wheel, wheel of fortune . . . Sometimes my gaze fastens itself to its spinning and I seem to hear, until sleep comes, the constant humming of the wheel, which is the voice of Tainaron itself.” In the end, Tainaron is perfectly mutable. It is a city of constant change, defined only by its endless state of motion.

In fact, in the twenty-second letter, as the narrator’s attempts to catalogue the city prove fruitless, her friend Longhorn informs her: “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps.” This description of the city could equally be applied to the book. Like many groundbreaking works,
Tainaron
is difficult to describe. It exists at the level of language, where ambiguity and nuance hold sway. It is not quite like anything else. In its unfamiliar method of exploring an unfamiliar place, it may be inaccessible at times; and yet as the story develops, the writing becomes addictive, mesmerizing. Krohn’s language is lyrical and evocative, but there’s something else, as well — her subtle, glancing way of probing at the mysteries of life and death. Unexpected insights arise from the mundane, but they are suggested so delicately that they remain almost intangible.

In this circuitous style, Krohn touches on ideas, backs away, then approaches from another direction; meaning accrues in the sidesteps. The central theme is change and transformation, which threads through every chapter. As one might expect in a city peopled by insects, metamorphosis is a key aspect of life in Tainaron:

Here you can bump into a stranger, and he will come up to you like an old acquaintance and begin to remember some past amusing coincidence that you apparently experienced together. When you ask, “When?”, he laughs and answers: “When I was someone else.”

Along with transformation, another major theme is that of individuality. As these themes develop, they find intersections and interconnections, eventually weaving their way into a single question: What is the soul, and will it survive? Or: Who will we be after we’re gone?

Though Krohn would never state it in such simplified terms, the novella seems to stage a debate. On one side is the notion that people carry with them an essential sameness, lasting from lifetime to lifetime; that a soul survives throughout the ages, no matter what form it takes. On the other side is the assertion that we are all manifestations of a central essence, endlessly combining and recombining from pieces of what we once were and will be again.