I have been absent a long time. Depression, etc. You know how it goes. But I have come across a book that I simply must tell people about. You need to experience Tainaron.
Tainaron: Mail From Another City is a slim novella by Finnish author Leena Krohn, translated by Hildi Hawkins. It was published in Finland in 1985, America in 2004, and appears to have been out of print for a Good While. It had its praises sung once upon a time, and except for being reprinted in Jeff and Anna VanderMeer’s compendium of weird fiction, seems have largely been forgotten. Which is a shame.
Tainaron’s synopsis is deceptively simple. An unnamed narrator writes to their ex lover about their experiences in a city populated by anthropomorphic insects. But it is so much more than that. It is a beautiful mediation on life, love, change, death, and grief. It is the kind of book that wraps you in melancholy like a warm sweater, and leaves you yearning yet satisfied.
Despite winning several horror awards when it was new and exciting, I do not consider Tainaron a horror novel. I think were it published now, people would sneer at it for being ‘lit fic’. It is lyrical, ambiguous, and very strange, but I do not find it especially horrific. And you guys Know Me I am always arguing the other way around, that things that are not categorized as horror Are Actually. But not this one. There is death here, yes, but the entire book is about the Necessity of Change, and death is yet another metamorphosis.
Which is not to say there is nothing horrific in the novel: it opens with the narrator and her guide and sometimes romantic interest, a beetle named Longhorn, rescuing a random person from getting eaten by a venus flytrap. The narrator herself always gets killed by an antlion. There are people sacrificing themselves on the hill every new moon, mysterious happenings with the aging prince, and whatever the hell is making strange noises in the streets at night. But the narrator’s love and awe, for the city, for the absent love, for Longhorn, for life itself, overshadows all of these things, even when she is at her most depressed, after winter comes and the city shuts down, and Longhorn enters a metamorphic state after which she will never see him again, there is grief, but there is love, and desire for Change.
Because Change is the crux on which the novel moves, the metamorphosis that had once perturbed the narrator so much becomes her eventual fate. And I do not read this as a horrific one. Instead, it is a letting go. She has ceased sending her letters to a man, and a world, that is not responding, and has decided to Change as the city Changes. Tainaron is Unnamable, you see, as it is in a constant state of being destroyed and rebuilt.
I can see why someone May read this as a horrific abandonment of one’s humanity, I just disagree with said reading. Krohn hits you over the head time and again that change is necessary to life, and that death, as change, is necessary to life, and that many of the narrator’s problems are due to her inability grasp this. In the end, she finally Understands, and begins her metamorphosis from Tourist to Resident. I find no horror in this. She has found her home. It is, to me, a happy ending.
And so I am begging you to read this. It is largely out of print, though you can get an amazon ebook for $6, and it is in the aforementioned anthology, which is how I initially found it. I thought, perhaps, if I loudly and lovingly evangelized this book I would, somehow, create enough of a renewed interest that I would, someday, end up with my own copy that I can put on my bookshelf. I hope I do. I hope, one day, we can all travel to Tainaron.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 