#tainaron

Tainaron - Mail from another city, Leena Krohn

5/5 stars Recommended for people who like: speculative fiction, weird stories, story fragments, slice-of-life, open endings Note: I am only reviewing Tainaron. Mail from Another City, not the entire collection. I may come back one day to review the whole collection, but for now my stars and comments only count for Tainaron. Tainaron is a fairly short story. I think it's maybe 70-some pages in total, with the 'chapters' being no more than a handful of pages each, so it's very easy to get through. That being said, it is also a very, very weird book. Most of the chapters/letters have some strange person or goings on, but it works, because Krohn manages to connect all the weirdness together. It's Alice in Wonderland-weird, not 'my cousin did LSD and wrote a story about his trip'-weird. It's a delicate balance for me when reading stories between Weird Stories that I like and Weird Stories that I don't (and often if I don't like them then I hate them), and there is something about the mix in Tainaron that I like. I really enjoyed how strange the story was and liked each new thing that Krohn brought to the table. Today it's human-sized flowers, a few days later a sinkhole, then winter that you can see coming, etc. It made each chapter/letter feel like its own story, but, as mentioned, also as part of a whole. The narrator is kind of hard to get a grasp on throughout the story. They're a tourist to Tainaron and are writing to someone who never replies. In their letters they describe the things they've experienced while in the city, the nice and the not-so-nice. Parts of it are written in a kind of poetry-prose, which obviously works to conceal the narrator's characterization behind pretty words and cut off phrases, but then other parts of the book are astoundingly open with the narrator's character. They don't shy away from admitting that sometimes they ask too many questions and end up in situations they aren't sure they want to be in. But then other times they reminisce on the past and emphasize these memories that the letters' receiver (and, I suppose, the audience) is supposed to know. The other characters are similarly veiled, with neither the narrator nor the audience really getting to know Longhorn, though the narrator certainly feels as though they know him deeply at the end. Longhorn is a fairly serious fellow, though he does humor the narrator at times and can take her rudeness and questions fairly well. Other than the recipient of the letters, who is never shown nor named, Longhorn is really the only continuous character in the story. The other characters in the story are talked about broadly, and often in the collective. When the narrator is astounded by the Fireflies, it is always the group, never a single individual, that catches their attention. Likewise, the narrator is intrigued by aspects of Queen Bee, but not particularly the Queen Bee herself. It is all broad strokes, yet somehow this doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the story the way not defining characters might in other books. Perhaps it's because Krohn doesn't just not flesh out the characters and leaves it, but rather she draws attention to other aspects of the characters while abandoning the traditional characterization methods (or, at least 'traditional' for English-speaking countries, which neither Leena Krohn nor Tainaron come from). The motifs and themes that cycled through the story were interesting as well. There are some in the first half (ex. individual vs. collective, particularly in regard to identity) that aren't in the second half, but almost all the motifs in the second half of Tainaron are in the first. The three main ones I picked up on throughout the book were: change and continuity, death and immortality, and memory. They can be pretty subtle at times and really feeds into this whole idea that you never really know what's going on in the city and with its inhabitants. The narrator questions a lot of things, which is really when these motifs and themes become obvious, but I though the way that they were woven throughout the story added a layer of complexity to it and really helps to jumpstart some thoughts and questions, which Krohn doesn't necessarily follow through on answering. Overall I really liked Tainaron and thought it was perfectly weird. Krohn doesn't really give you any answers to the questions she and the narrator raise in the book, but I don't think that detracts from it and instead leaves readers with things to think about and flesh out for themselves.

And then, only then, may the wave of my life lick your knees when you come out to swim and play

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