Finnish writer Leena Krohn has been writing some of the greatest fiction of last fifty years, and we have not tended to notice. When I say, “we,” I primarily mean those of us who read English exclusively, because Finland certainly noticed. Tainaron was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 1985 and The Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1998 and won the Thanks for the Book Award in 1986. I had no idea who Krohn was until 2015, when I received Krohn: Collected Fiction, published by Cheeky Frawg Books, in English. I didn’t actually open the book and read any of it until about three years later, when Hurricane Florence ravaged Wilmington, North Carolina and kept me away from my grad classes for a whole month. That was when I first began Krohn’s collection and encountered her 1985 novel, Tainaron: Mail from Another City.

 

Tainaron is an elusive work, equal parts science fiction, fantasy, and fable. Though well-received and even praised by American critics when it first received an English printing in 2004, Tainaron quickly faded into relative obscurity and went out of print until its inclusion in the larger collection in 2015. When he first read it in 2004, Jeff VanderMeer listed Tainaron as one of his six best novels of the year. I think it is telling that it felt cutting-edge to acclaimed writers like VanderMeer in 2004, two decades after it was written. I think it is even more telling that it felt cutting-edge to me in 2018. The premise of Krohn’s novella is simple: a human woman travels to Tainaron, a city filled with anthropomorphic insects. While in Tainaron, she sends a series of thirty letters to someone, presumably a former or current lover. Tainaron reads as a one-sided epistolary novella, the narrator’s letters never receiving replies and her becoming increasingly frustrated with this lack of response while simultaneously becoming more and more disconnected from the human world. Tainaron anthropomorphizes its insects, but it is also interested in complicating that anthropomorphism. Insects may be people here, but they are certainly not human.

 

Tainaron’s premise may be simple, but its execution is remarkable. Sometimes Tainaron reads like a meditation on humanity, but often, it is more invested in non-humanity or perhaps insectness. Tainaron is a sort of insect manifesto, but it is also an explicit rejection of Humanism and its obsession with the singular, monolithic individual. In the insect world of Tainaron, there are hiveminds and antennae, but most importantly, there are metamorphoses. There is no fixed essence of being: people (insects) change in ways which reject any sort of continuity or “sameness.” The narrator outlines her uncomfortableness with metamorphosis early on in the novella:

 

“This phenomenon is metamorphosis; and for me, at least, it is so strange, to my very marrow, that even to think about it makes me feel uncomfortable. For, you see, the people here live two or many consecutive lives, which may have nothing in common, although one follows from the last in a way that is incomprehensible to me.”

 

The best framework for understanding the heart of Tainaron may be posthumanism, the ideological system which emerged in response to Humanism’s focus on the value of human life over that of other organisms. As the Oxford English Dictionary Online notes, the posthuman stresses the “rejection of the notion of the rational, autonomous individual” in favor of “the nature of the self as fragmentary and socially and historically conditioned.” Reinvigorated by Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism in her seminal Cyborg Manifesto, and in recent works which aim to consider the lives, feelings, and even rhetoric of animal interactions, the posthuman seeks to overturn the humanist division between human and animal. Perhaps this is all a bit too theoretical for a review of a novella about an insect city, but Krohn is a theoretical writer. Her sentences toe the line between the literal and the metaphorical, maintaining a delicate balance of surreally suspended disbelief. Every sentence in this brief collection of letters is filled with lyricism and wit. My time as an English grad student transformed me into one of those sacrilegious individuals who writes in the margins of books and underlines sentences, but I found myself unable to underline anything in Tainaron because to do so would be to mark almost every line.

This book is concise, no sentence out of place or half-baked. Hildi Hawkins, the English translator, deserves much of the credit for maintaining perfect word choice in translation. Nothing about Tainaron feels lost in translation, every surreal, Kafkaesque turn of phrase as it should be. This is a story invested in memory, both collective and individual. In what it means to be a person and how exactly we ought to go about being one. The nameless narrator’s city guide, Longhorn, a very practical beetle with extensive city knowledge, keeps the narrator and the reader on their toes, forcing us to question and reexamine what we know about life, place, character. Most of all, Tainaron serves as a literary, complex, lyrical roadmap for navigating change.

 

“We, too, change, but gradually. We are used to a certain continuity, and most of us have a character that remains more or less constant. It is different here. It remains a mystery to me what the real connection is between two consecutive lives. How can a person who changes so completely still say he is an any sense the same as before? How can he continue? How can he remember?”

 

Tainaron doesn’t answer all its own questions about change. It does, however, shift the way we consider selfhood, permanence, continuity. And it does so via some of the greatest prose writing I’ve ever read.

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