Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (105 page)

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.

There is a girl whose aunt, Perpetua Pöntiö, is a geologist who lives in the Mare Serenitatis on the Moon. The girl spends her vacation each year visiting her aunt. The Moon, once carefully maintained, is no longer what it used to be. The colonies have been abandoned and their technology has fallen into disrepair. The girl’s aunt is the last remaining resident.

None of this matters to Perpetua, quite the contrary. She is happy with stagnation and solitude. She likes dust, emptiness, and the long lunar nights. What’s more, she now has plenty of space to race around in her moon buggy.

However, men from the government have got it in their heads that the Moon is nothing but a nuisance and must be demolished and gotten out of the way. Of course, the girl’s aunt will have to move back to Earth. In the end, she refuses and makes a different choice.

“Mare Serenitatis” is a description of the persistence of a strong person, the kind that won’t be pushed around. All of us know at least one Aunt Perpetua, or at least wish we did.

The same conflict between the common good and individual happiness is explored in another story from
Secrets,
“New Opabinia” (“Uusi Opabinia”), which is set on Earth rather than the Moon.

Julia buys a new animal for her aquarium. It has five eyes and a proboscis with pincers on the end. She soon notices that it is of very old stock. The entire genus of Opabinia became extinct 500 million years ago.

Fame, fortune, and scientific breakthroughs. These are what Julia’s brother expects this prehistoric find to bring. Julia disagrees, however. She is more concerned with the wellbeing of the animal than with scientific results or getting her face on the front page of a newspaper. So, she decides to release the strange creature into nature.

The other stories in
Secrets
are also filled with mysteries, as befits the name. Extinguished stars, secret passages to other times, and invisibility. There is happiness of one kind or another to be found in all of them, just as well all have our bright sides.

Who is the Armpit’s Spouse?

What if shirts are meant to be misbuttoned? What if there is someone behind every traffic light directing traffic? Or if coffee could speak? Or the world was floating in a soap bubble? Or if the knee were the armpit’s spouse?

One of Krohn’s recurring subjects is the questioning of the self-evident, the shaking of received truths. She believes that, as humans, we are held prisoner by our senses—hearing, taste, and the rest only register a fraction of our surroundings. What is there to be found in the places they do not reach, or cannot or will not detect?

The novel
Umbra
(1990) looks at these questions from twenty-seven angles.

Umbra is a middle-aged, balding gentleman who spends his free time collecting paradoxes and pondering the meaning of infinity. His job is to help those with an illness of the mind or body, but he has a habit of being distracted by his hobbies.

Umbra meets a great many people through his work. In the hospital, he meets a girl who swallowed a five-mark coin who is getting the contents of her stomach x-rayed and a mute woman who contorts her body into the shapes of symbols. Umbra spends his Friday’s in an aid service for the exhausted solving all kinds of problems, from marital crises to panic attacks suffered by an AI. At the clinic, he tries unsuccessfully to cure sex offenders, rapists and pedophiles. Umbra is not necessarily good at helping people, though, as his ruminations on infinity, free will, and morality keep unexpectedly popping into his head while he’s working. He’s actually a terrible therapist when you think about it. Gruff, selfish, and self-absorbed.

What if one side of a card bears the text “The sentence on the other side of this card is true,” while the other side reads “The sentence on the other side of this card is not true”? These are the kinds of paradoxes that Umbra collects for a book he is working on. It seems that the world is full of irrational things, however, which keeps him from finishing it. And the most frightening of paradoxes, dizzying in its scale, is of course infinity.