Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction Read online

  LEENA KROHN

  COLLECTED FICTION

  Cheeky Frawg Books

  Tallahassee, Florida

  cheekyfrawg.com

  This edition copyright © 2015, Leena Krohn. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For original publication dates in Finnish, please refer to the dates listed in the table of contents.

  Essays: “Foreword” copyright 2015, Jeff VanderMeer, original to this collection; “Change and Transformation in Tainaron copyright 2013, Desirina Boskovich, first appearing at weirdfictionreview.com; “On Tainaron,” copyright Matthew Cheney (2012), Matthew Cheney, first appearing at weirdfictionreview.com; “The Robot and the Ant: The Tales of Leena Krohn” copyright Minna Jerrman,” first appearing in Tähtivaeltaja Magazine (2002), translated into English by J. Robert Tupasela (translation copyright 2015).

  Fiction translations copyright to the individual translators: Eva Buckwald: “Final Appearance”; Bethany Fox: The Pelican’s New Clothes (2015), “Would I Believe My Eyes” (2015); Hildi Hawkins: Doña Quixote (1995), Tainaron (2004), Gold of Ophir (1995), Pereat Mundus (2015), “Gorgonoids” (1993), “To Sleep, To Die” (2004), “Me and My Shadow” (2013), “Afterword: When the Viewer Vanishes” (2015); Anselm Hollo: “Really Existing?” (2007); Vivii Hyvönen: “The Lord of My Death” (2015), “Lucilia Illustris” (2015); Leena Likitalo: “The Divider,” “Picture Book,” “Filemon or the Wooden Man,” “The Queen of the Night and Other Strangers” (all 2015); Herbert Lomas: “The Paradox Archive” (1991); J. Robert Tupasela: “The Robot and the Ant: The Tales of Leena Krohn by Mina Jerrman”; Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela: Datura (2013).

  All translations listed with a copyright date of 2015 are original to this collection. All British/American spellings have been preserved as rendered in the original translations.

  Translations by Eva Buckwald, Bethany Fox, Hildi Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Vivii Hyvönen, Leena Likitalo, Herbert Lomas, J. Robert Tupasela, and Anna Volmari.

  ISBN 978-0-9863177-2-9

  Cheeky Frawg is run by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

  Managing Editor Adam Mills

  Consulting Editor Juha Tupasela

  Cover art & design by Jeremy Zerfoss

  Interior design by John Coulthart

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  Cheeky Frawg

  POB 4248

  Tallahassee, FL 32315

  [email protected]

  CONTENTS

  — COMPLETE NOVELS AND NOVELLAS —

  Foreward by Jeff VanderMeer

  DOÑA QUIXOTE AND OTHER CITIZENS. PORTRAIT

  (1983)

  TAINARON. MAIL FROM ANOTHER CITY

  (1985)

  GOLD OF OPHIR

  (1987)

  PEREAT MUNDUS: A NOVEL OF SORTS

  (1998)

  DATURA, OR A FIGMENT SEEN BY EVERYONE

  (2001)

  THE PELICAN’S NEW CLOTHES (Children’s fiction)

  (1976)

  — SHORT STORIES AND EXCERPTS FROM LARGER WORKS —

  THE PARADOX ARCHIVE

  from Umbra (1990)

  Three from MATHEMATICAL CREATURES, OR SHARED DREAMS:

  ‘Gorgonoids’, ‘The Lord of My Death’, ‘Lucilia Illustris’ (1992)

  TO SLEEP, TO DIE

  from Dreamdeath (2004)

  REALLY EXISTING?

  from The Bee Pavilion (2006)

  Four from FALSE WINDOW:

  ‘The Divider’, ‘Picture Book’, ‘Filemon or the Wooden Man’, ‘The Queen of the Night and Other Strangers’ (2009)

  ME AND MY SHADOW

  from Hotel Sapiens and Other Irrational Tales (2012)

  FINAL APPEARANCE

  (2014)

  APPENDIX:

  Critical essays by Matthew Cheney, Desirina Boskovich and Minna Jerrman, and an afterword by Leena Krohn

  FORWARD

  by Jeff VanderMeer

  Leena Krohn, one of Finland’s greatest writers, is the kind of storyteller who rewires your brain. She forces you to adapt to her pace, her particular and unique ideas of urgency and of characterization and of plot. The ceaseless roving, testing, and journeying that manifests in Krohn’s fiction originates from a fierce intellect. Krohn is curious about the world, and she has the kind of philosophical mind to make that exploration fascinating to readers. In her fiction, however, this philosophical quest is often entwined with the visceral—her novels aren’t abstractions, but alive with details of character and setting and situation that display a keen eye for observation of the world around her.

  Krohn’s usual form is a kind of “mosaic” novel, in which short chapters advance the overall story arc but also form complete tales in and of themselves. Her adoption of this structure is wise—the rate of ideas and images conveyed in a typical chapter, even when playful, has a density that might overwhelm in longer increments, but seems layered and useful at the short length. It also creates a puzzle aspect respectful of reader intelligence and imagination, as the reader pieces together the final form of the novel chapter by chapter—even when certain pieces seem at first unrelated.

  The author’s inquisitiveness and creativity are on display from the opening pages of her first adult novel, Dona Quixote. The novel follows a nameless person around an impressionistic version of Helsinki. This narrator encounters the titular character in some scenes, and in others engages in ruminations about her roaming. As with later works, the quality of the prose, the mystery of Dona Quixote, and Krohn’s unique ideas have a mesmerizing effect. Plot accretes like sedimentary layers and the whole, laid bare, creates a sense of the mysterious and the universal.

  In later works, Krohn layers in more fantastical characters, which only grounds her work more firmly in the real and the present-day. Her justly celebrated novel Tainaron exemplifies the worth of this approach: not only is there an interesting symbolism in chapters that include a hillside immolation of beetles and another with sand lions, but the insect characters themselves have depth and an intrinsic meaning beyond that symbolism. In doing so, Krohn also displays a love and respect for the natural world that occurs throughout her fiction. (The children’s novel The Pelican’s New Clothes, included in this collection for the first time in English, may contain the clearest expression of this stance.)

  But perhaps the greatest feat in Tainaron is that without giving the reader any details about the narrator, Krohn manages to give us a clear portrait of this person. This portrait arrives mostly from what is not said, juxtaposed with the few clues we receive. It’s a masterful feat of characterization, and it speaks to the essential mystery of Krohn’s writing: that she is sui generis and she creates fiction in her own special way, and yet she speaks to the universal through this uniqueness.

  Krohn could also be said to be one of our foremost thinkers about not just the present but the future. Among the delights of this collection isPereat Mundus, a novel previously unpublished in English that details the lives of a series of cloned biotech versions of a person named Hakan. In these vignettes, Krohn explores what it means to be human, both good and bad aspects of our modern society, and questions of life and death. Not only are Hakan’s lives various and fascinating, but the accumulated effect of the doubling creates a remarkable pathos. As importantly, Krohn’s exploration of biotech and artificial intelligence occurred well before it became trendy in fiction—if this novel had been translated into English the year it came out in Finland, it might well have entered the canon of science fiction as a groundbreaking work.

  A lovely strangeness is also on display in these fic
tions, to go along with the memorable characters and ideas. Gold of Ophir is transgressive, striking, bold, and provides further evidence of the sharpness of Krohn’s prose. Who can forget the airplane explosion in the middle of the book, and the image of passenger seats floating in the air? Who can forget the tuatara lizard, who travels through the text in unexpected and luminous ways? In Ophir, Krohn has created a unique community, too, and there is an abiding joy and dark sense of discovery as a reader exploring that world with Krohn.

  Even in a more playful mode, like the novel Datura, about a reporter for an odd magazine and an even odder plant, Krohn pushes our understanding of reality and interrogates our assumptions. A scene with automated cars will linger in the imagination long after being read, and the reporter’s interactions with an eccentric collection of characters demonstrates a sympathy for, an empathy for, the individual that is refreshing and, in some ways, charming. (Datura also features the fabled Voynich Manuscript, to great effect.)

  But along with the joy of reading Krohn there is also a frustration: despite the length of this collection, so much of her work has yet to be published into English. Krohn is a prolific writer, with over twenty-six works of fiction to her credit. So many wonderful stories and novels await translation. For this reason, the glimpses into those other fictions provided by the second half of this volume are of particular interest—and because Krohn writes mosaic novels, these glimpses are much more self-contained and thus satisfying than might have been the case.

  What these selections reveal is a body of work even wider and deeper than previous guessed at. Whether it’s fiction inspired by the Decadents or an examination of the meaning of terrorism or engaging with ethics in science, Krohn’s mind is forever roving, forever willing to grapple with difficult topics, forever engaged with the human and post-human condition. (Essays like Minna Jerrman’s overview of Krohn’s fiction and Krohn’s own afterword provide excellent additional context on Krohn’s approaches and themes.)

  These effects and approaches are unique in fiction, unique embodied in a single writer. No one writes quite like Krohn, and for this reason I have made no comparisons in this foreword. Instead, all I can end with is a promise: If you take on the adventure of reading these pages, you will not come away from that journey unchanged or unmoved. You will find yourself challenged, enthralled, horrified, delighted—and, yes, in some moments, you will be overtaken by awe at the beauty and complexity of this world, this universe, we inhabit. Such is the power of Leena Krohn’s fiction.

  -Jeff VanderMeer, October 2015

  DOÑA QUIXOTE

  AND OTHER CITIZENS.

  PORTRAIT

  (Tales of the citizens of an usual city)

  1983

  Translated by Hildi Hawkins

  Do not make images. Everything is.

  Mirkka Rekola

  The Sparrow

  I cannot forget that, on the cliffs in the park, I stepped on a wounded bird. Its helpless movement under my heel, its absolute softness.

  When I raised my foot, it was still able to flutter on to a stone beneath a lime-tree. We watched it and, in front of us on the granite, it buried its beak in its feathers, and there was no more movement.

  ‘A small sparrow and a great peace,’ Doña Quixote said.

  It was the first day of autumn; the weather had changed. Behind the lime-trees the blue perspective of the clouds darkened.

  ‘In the winter we shall be able to ski to those islands, unless I am that sparrow,’ she said.

  Why did she say that? I felt, again, the suffering under my heel, as if it had been a human face.

  Later, when we were walking on the beach, a choir was singing unceasingly: very dear, high voices, women’s or boys’. It was an aria no one had heard before, and it was born in the masts and rigging of the yacht-club’s boats.

  When the sky blackens, I, too, become sombre.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Doña Quixote.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ I say. ‘No, I really can’t.’

  ‘What is it you have to bear, then?’ she asks, and I answer: ‘To live here on this rubbish-heap of a star for another thirty or forty or fifty years.’

  ‘You deserve a beating,’ says Doña Quixote. ‘They’re not years at all.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ I’m amazed.

  ‘No,’ says Doña Quixote, ‘they’re days.’

  I calculate that forty years make seventeen thousand six hundred sunsets.

  ‘When you have seen them all,’ says Doña Quixote, ‘are you sure you won’t want to see another one, and then another . . . ’

  The Darkness of Mirrors

  The city is full of dark rooms. One of them was in the fun fair. In fact, it was the whole of a small house.

  From the outside, it was very unassuming: just a cabin painted in candy colours, meant for use only in summer. The inside walls and the roof were entirely covered in mirror glass; even the pillars that supported the roof were covered in mirrored casings.

  The house was a kind of labyrinth: the entrance and exit had their own corridors, long and winding.

  The house’s name was the House of Laughter.

  We took the children to the House of Laughter. We went in without paying, since the booth where tickets were sold was empty.

  I laughed seldom, and constrainedly – did little more, really, than sneer. An ordinary mirror image is, for me, at least as strange as the reflections caused by the convex and concave mirror surfaces here.

  I did recognise myself in the form of bottle and a pumpkin, with a barrel-like pancake-face and as tall as a flag-post. I recognised myself from the fact that the eyes of all these ghosts were inhabited by the same absence as my own. It made them even more ridiculous, but at the same time it felt bitter.

  I thought that if I were to spend longer with my reflections, I would become confused with them, and no one would be able to say any longer where they had their origin.

  But the children had fun. They ran around the House of Laughter and wanted me to admire their caricatures, their grins and their echoes.

  Until the doors banged. It was an unmistakable noise, even behind the laughter: someone was slamming the doors and bolting them. Immediately afterwards, the lights went out. Darkness slipped out from behind the mirrors, over the mirrors, down to the bottom of the mirrors. As if it had been there all the time, simply awaiting its opportunity.

  For a moment, too, all sounds were absent, until I heard the children cry out.

  ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ I heard myself shout, and began to grope about me.

  Strange: I really did exist, although the reflections had gone.

  Their unseen arms wound themselves around my hips, and I told them all was well. We just had to wait.

  We waited. The darkness had taken all the images. It had separated forms and reflections and put what only seemed to exist into its large pocket. But the darkness itself had countless reflections.

  We waited. Nowhere is the darkness so deep as in the House of Laughter. From mirror to mirror it repeats itself and deepens, rises in a scream from the mirror’s well only to fall into another chasm. Its echo is stronger than the scream itself.

  We waited. And I was still not sure the reflections had really gone. Hidden by the darkness, they were waiting with us, as grotesque and unjust as before.

  If the minotaur exists, I thought, it must live here, and all its swaying heads are our own.

  Someone flicked on a cigarette lighter. A little old man had joined us.

  ‘This way,’ he said, and set off in front of us. The flame wavered on the walls and the roof and all the reflections followed him, bottles and pumpkins, barrels and flag-poles.

  When we got out of the House of Laughter, the sky was pale green as glass, but the coloured lights of the fun fair were already being switched on, all at once.

  I had forgotten there were so many colours.

  Straw

  The winter had been hard, and a haze of indifferenc
e had surrounded me for a long time. My tongue was covered with a kind of film, and everything in life had lost its flavour. When I tried to grasp something, my hand became paralysed. A sticky substance isolated me from the world.

  Early that spring, I met Doña Quixote for the first time. Where on earth was it? There, on the high hill where one can see the city and the harbour and the sea.

  I was sitting on the pedestal of a statue when something passed me by. It was as long and thin as a piece of straw, and it moved so lightly that it seemed to slip along above the dust of the road. It had a pair of binoculars at its neck and it stopped by the railing and began to look out to sea.

  The ice had just melted and the sea was breaking up into the year’s first white horses. The piece of straw stood on the spot for so long and was so motionless that I soon forgot there was anyone there.

  I, too, believed myself to be invisible. My coat was the same colour as the stone of the statue, and I imagined I blended unnoticeably into the fluttering clothes and noiseless cries of the cluster of people.

  But the piece of straw had turned, and was examining the sculpture.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘Are you speaking to me?’ I said, alarmed.

  ‘I can’t see anyone else here,’ she said calmly. ‘Do you think they will be saved?’

  ‘The shipwrecked people, you mean? I’ve never asked myself that. A statue isn’t a story, you know,’ I said smartly.

  ‘No, that’s true,’ she conceded. ‘But that cry – I’ve heard it elsewhere in this city. And then you start questioning . . . yourself, above all.’

  ‘Do you get any answers?’ I asked.

  ‘I seldom answer,’ she said. ‘But I don’t need to: life answers. It is generally a long and thorough answer.’