Leena Krohn, The Collected Fiction, Trans. by Eva Buckwald, Bethany Fox, Hildi Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Vivii Hyvönen, Leena Likitalo, Herbert Lomas, J. Robert Tupasela, and Anna Volmari. Nonfiction by Minna Jerrman, Desirina Boskovich, Matthew Cheney. Cheeky Frawg Books, 2015.
Electric Literature showcases an excerpt from Collected Fiction.
Electric Literature interviews Leena Krohn.
A celebration of a legendary Finnish author, with several novels, stories, and appreciations. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson, and Italo Calvino. Over 800 pages covering Leena Krohn's entire career.
“One of the most important books published in the U.S. this year. [Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction] is as important a publishing event in its own way as New Directions’ release... of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories.” - The Mumpsimus
There’s been a big push over the past few years to better recognize the contributions of international authors to the canon of speculative fiction—and when it comes to Finnish spec-fic, Leena Krohn reigns. In Collected Fiction, a massive hardcover anthology of her work (assembled by the renowned editing team of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), the acclaimed and award-winning author is given a lavish introduction to American readers. Populated by sentient insects, an archivist of paradoxes, and the surveyor of an imaginary city—reminiscent of everyone from Jorge Luis Borges to Italo Calvino to Margaret Atwood—the stories and short novels contained in this volume layer language, consciousness, and morality in a dreamlike fugue that captivates as it transcends. - Jason Heller
https://www.avclub.com/our-favorite-books-of-the-year-1798287125
From cities of giant insects to a mysterious woman claiming to be the female Don Quixote, Leena Krohn’s fiction has fascinated and intrigued readers for over forty years. Within these covers you will discover a pelican that can talk and a city of gold. You will find yourself exploring a future of intelligence both artificial and biotech, along with a mysterious plant that induces strange visions. Krohn writes eloquently, passionately, about the nature of reality, the nature of Nature, and what it means to be human. One of Finland’s most iconic writers, translated into many languages, and winner of the prestigious Finlandia Prize, Krohn has had an incredibly distinguished career. Collected Fiction provides readers with a rich, thick omnibus of the best of her work. This collection includes several previously unpublished English translations, foremost among them the novels Pereat Mundus and The Pelican's New Clothes. Other novels included are: Tainaron, Dona Quixote, Ophir City of Gold, and Datura.
Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction is a massive omnibus that we feel is a landmark publishing event, collecting novels, novellas, and short stories from one of Finland’s most iconic and beloved fiction writers. In her critically acclaimed fiction, Krohn has distinguished herself as a forward-thinking writer, often tackling themes related to the nature of reality, the environment, the internet, and artificial intelligence well before fashionable. A major advocate for feminism and social justice in Finland, she has been compared to Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Woolf, among others. Krohn’s fiction has been translated into dozens of languages and received several awards, including the Finlandia Prize.
Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction allows English-language readers to experience the full range of this remarkable writer’s talent. Within its pages, you will find not just new short story translations but the first English-language translation of Pereat Mundus, a mind-bending novel of philosophy, science, and the future—as well as first publication of the playful but pointed children’s fantasy novel The Pelican’s New Clothes (made into a movie in Finland), which explored, in prophetic fashion, our relationship to animals. Krohn’s classic Tainaron: Mail From Another City is also included, along with several essays and appreciations of her work. Finally, we have brought back into print after long absence novels like the impressionistic Doña Quixote and Other Citizens: A Portrait, about a mysterious woman in an unnamed city, and Gold of Ophir, set in the same city as Doña Quixote.
On a personal note, we should add that we are passionate advocates for Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction. Krohn’s work is deeply relevant to the times we live in, the perspective always thoughtful and lively and deep. You will find in her work ideas, situations, and characters that are unique in literature.
Sincerely,
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
A welcome gathering of works by Finnish writer Krohn, a brilliant conjurer of possible worlds.
The narrator of Krohn’s early novel Doña Quixote and Other Citizens: A Portrait, a lovely reimagining of Cervantes, is a world-weary stranger in a strange land of rough stone and crowded towers who cannot bear the thought of living “on this rubbish-heap of a star for another thirty or forty or fifty years.” Doña Quixote, seer more than dreamer, becomes her Virgil in a place whose inhabitants bear names such as The Wader, The Looking-Glass Boy, and The Incurable One. In such a place, Doña Quixote sagely observes, “everyone has to be Hamlet.” Krohn’s imagined, ghostly worlds form the setting of other books gathered here, including Tainaron: Mail from Another City (1985) and Gold of Ophir (1987); these unfold in brief episodes, some just a few paragraphs long, that embrace improbable geometries and physics, worlds of “insignificant protuberances that were at first hardly distinguishable from the surrounding sandy plain,” say, that conjure up the hallucinatory closing pages of Poe’s tale of Arthur Pym. Krohn’s work has been likened to Ursula LeGuin’s, though often it is more reminiscent of Calvino, Borges, and Lem, layered in with foreboding bits of Lovecraft. Not exactly science fiction, not exactly fantasy, but some hybrid of those genres blended with literary fiction, Krohn’s tales often involve the exploration of consciousness both human and animal—and, at times, that of machines—against myth-tinged backgrounds, as with one story whose protagonist is the offspring of a human mother and “one of the first multi-species hybrids.” Philosophically nimble, those stories trade in wonderment: here time twists so that a figure “no longer owned anything, not even her own past,” while there a character comes to each word in her native language as if encountering it for the first time—though that may just be the effects of a dose of datura.
An extraordinary writer who deserves to be better known to readers in English—which, thanks to this excellent collection, is now possible. - Kirkus Reviews
This ambitious collection of short and long fiction is a delightful feast of the finest SF. Krohn's creations are crisp and concise, using precision of language to convey tales frightening and fantastical. The enchanting and challenging "Tainaron: Mail from Another City" evokes the enthusiasm of a tourist's reports, which describe an alien city full of horrors made more shocking by their familiarity. Its meditation on individuality is echoed in "Pereat Mundus: a Novel of Sorts." In "Datura: or a Figment Seen by Everyone," the style is tender and romantic as it conveys the protagonist's courtship of the supernatural even at the risk of her own life. The inclusion of essays, an appendix, and a philosophical poem supports and enhances the reading. The most haunting moments are to be found among the short fiction and novel excerpts. An author's palpable disappointment gives "Final Appearance," an unforgettable, heartbreaking symmetry, and the excerpt from Dreamdeath has a cold inevitability as dreamers select their own fates. Fans of strange and wonderful ficiton will relish the opportunity to appreciate the scope of Krohn's vision as it develops with her unique and confident voice. - Publishers Weekly
In the 11th century, the German historian Adam of Bremen wrote that the Finns "are to this day so superior in the magic arts or incantations that they profess to know what everyone is doing the world over.... All this is easy for them through practice." Their command of words and sorcery is so legendary that modern Swedes who consult a fortuneteller say that they are "paying a visit to the Finns."
Yet why is it that only a few Finnish writers — among them Tove Jansson, Elias Lönnrot (compiler of the "Kalevala"), Johanna Sinissalo and the Estonian Finnish Sofi Oksanen — are known to American readers?
Cheeky Frawg, a small press specializing in the literature of the fantastic, often in translation, is publishing an omnibus volume of the brilliant, visionary modernist Leena Krohn — think Jorge Luis Borges intersecting with Isak Dinesen, Flann O'Brien, Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino.
The comparisons help put Krohn's body of work into context but do nothing to capture the ineffable, melancholy strangeness and beauty of her writing. This is great literature: Shame on us for only now discovering it.
Krohn has written more than 30 books for adults and young readers. A variety of works published between 1976 and 2009 are collected here, including six short novels and novellas, short stories, critical essays and novel excerpts, some of which have been difficult to find in the U.S.
The volume opens with "Dona Quixote and Other Citizens. Portrait (Tales of the Citizens of an Unusual City)." The book consists of a series of chapters, most only a page or two in length, which can also be read as individual stories — a technique similar to that of Lydia Davis and a hallmark of nearly all of Krohn's fiction here. The "unusual city," never named, is recognizable as modern Helsinki but a Helsinki at once as commonplace and marvelous as Gabriel García-Marquez's Macondo. Here is the narrator's first meeting with the eponymous protagonist:
"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 at the sea."
The piece of straw is an old woman known as Dona Quixote, and so odd yet acute are Krohn's descriptions of the city and its denizens that a reader is at first not quite certain whether the story is set on Earth or indeed if the narrator (or Dona Quixote) is human. It's as though the story was told by a member of another species, amazed by even the most mundane things.
This sense of mingled strangeness and recognition reverberates through all of Krohn's work, most clearly in "Tainaron: Mail From Another City." The narrative is framed as a series of letters, never answered, written by an unnamed woman to her distant lover, describing the city where she now lives — where the residents are insects.
Many of them are human-sized and possessed of human speech, their behavior a distorted mirror held up to that of Homo sapiens. In a vast, teeming beehive, the narrator has an audience with the immense queen, who, ceaselessly giving birth to her offspring, shrieks, "But what is a mother? … She from whom everything flows is not a someone …"
Later, at a funeral parlor, the narrator is shown the exquisite coffins that hold only "a single organ, often an eye or antenna [or] part of a wing, a part with a beautiful pattern." Told that there is no crematorium in Tainaron, she insists on knowing what happens to the rest of the bodies. The funeral director takes her to an underground chamber, where she is at first sickened and then exalted by the sight of dung beetles devouring the dead. "And here, then, was their work: to distill pure nectar from such filth, to extract from the slimy liquid of death health, strength and new life."
This singular vision of a transcendent connection between species also shines in "Datura," where ingesting the seeds of the titular poisonous plant subtly changes the way a woman perceives the world, and "The Pelican's New Clothes," in which a pelican befriends a lonely boy named Emil. Only children recognize him as a pelican: dressed in human clothing, the pelican calls himself Mr. Henderson. He gets a job taking tickets at the opera and is enthralled by "The Magic Flute." (He especially likes the birdcatcher, Papageno.) Reminiscent of Roald Dahl's work, it's a book that deserves to be called a classic.
As do nearly all of the extraordinary tales collected here. "Beauty is the universe's most enduring quality," Krohn, now 68, states in her afterword, "it is repeated in atoms and galaxies, numbers and relations and the way a tree grows." This is a writer whose work can rewire your brain, leaving you with an enhanced, near-hallucinatory apprehension of our fragile planet, and of all the beings that inhabit it. - Elizabeth Hand
http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-leena-krohn-20151227-story.html
Likewise, Leena Krohn’s COLLECTED FICTION is inherently indulgent: It’s massive, as befits the encapsulation of a prolific (Finnish) writer’s life work, and it’s multifaceted, deploying varied formats and lenses, including multiple translators, to present a complete picture. Within are short stories, several short novels, poetry, and essays about Krohn, including one by the author herself.
http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-leena-krohn-20151227-story.html
Likewise, Leena Krohn’s COLLECTED FICTION is inherently indulgent: It’s massive, as befits the encapsulation of a prolific (Finnish) writer’s life work, and it’s multifaceted, deploying varied formats and lenses, including multiple translators, to present a complete picture. Within are short stories, several short novels, poetry, and essays about Krohn, including one by the author herself.
Since most English-language readers will have encountered Krohn’s work only via her epistolic novel “Tainaron: Mail From Another City” (translated in the United States in 2004), if at all, probably the most useful thing this collection does is put that novel into its proper context. It becomes rapidly clear that Krohn’s work is not meant to stand alone. Creatures and characters string together in a constantly self-referential loop that’s mostly lacking in plot or narrative — but there’s significance to which characters reappear, and which themes Krohn addresses again and again. The doctor in the excerpted novel “Umbra,” who confronts his own fears while ostensibly examining a neurotic sentient computer, might as well have worked at the old hospital in the excerpt from “The Bee Pavilion”; what seems to interest Krohn more than artificial intelligence are the struggles of the mind, and the struggles of individuals and groups to define it.
It’s debatable whether Krohn’s works qualify as science fiction or fantasy, not that it matters. Missing is the “sensawunda” said to characterize the genre; Krohn’s settings are fantastical and deeply weird, but they’re mostly secondary to the people — or philosophy, or sociology — she really wants to explore. Even in a story like “Tainaron,” in which the narrator writes letters describing a city populated by insects, Krohn focuses primarily on metaphors for the human condition. “Never trust a flower,” the narrator’s guide says, upon rescuing a citizen from a giant carnivorous plant. “Next time, think where you put your head.” A caution relevant to any dweller in any city, insect-inhabited or not. This is a haunting, lovely book. - N. K. Jemisin
In Leena Krohn’s novella “Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone,” the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. “What does the word refer to,” she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, “does it really signify anything at all?” But it’s not that meaning is absent; rather, it is hidden in layers of signification. Like the manuscript she is working on, all books are “ciphers, cryptographies, beyond all interpretation.” A friend urges the narrator to stop eating the seeds, but the damage is done: the hallucinations persist, and in the end she succumbs to the visionary reality of the plant, which she says “took me towards the ultimate secret of existence,” so that she was “willing to trade all that had come before in exchange for it.”
“Datura, or A Delusion We All See” is one of the standout stories in “Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction,” published late last year by Cheeky Frawg Books. The collection is the most extensive English translation yet of work by the celebrated Finnish writer, who has been a finalist for the prestigious World Fantasy Award and is a winner of the Finlandia Prize, the country’s most important literary honor. The novels, novellas, excerpts, and short stories included in the Cheeky Frawg collection are not narratives in the traditional sense so much as a series of contextualized impressions. Plot is hard to come by. Instead, Krohn offers up the narrated inner lives of characters trying to make sense of their environments, and of the other people whom they encounter. Many of the works are set in cities, but the worlds that Krohn’s characters inhabit never feel concrete: everything is mediated through particular characters’ perceptions. The reader is left with the sense of having intruded on someone’s dream, in which symbols are revelations of intimate details.
“Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us,” Krohn wrote to me recently, in an e-mail. (Her responses to my questions were translated from the Finnish by J. Robert Tupasela, one more layer of decoding.) “Dream images and delusions throw up information, often metaphorical or allegorical,” she added. “In my books, I try to use every channel of information possible, keeping in mind that information is not what is most important in literature, meaning is.” Krohn was born in Helsinki in 1947. Her childhood was full of books and art—her father, Alf Krohn, was a journalist and the editor-in-chief of a Finnish art magazine called Taide—and she picked up an interest in spiritual matters from her paternal grandparents, who were theosophists. Krohn read the “Kalevala” and “Kanteletar,” the mythopoetic epics of Finland, but it was writers like the early twentieth-century poet Eino Leino who affected her most. Leino, in Krohn’s words, “renewed the language of Finnish folkloric poems. The collection ‘Helkavirsiä’ in particular,” she added, “still sings in my memory.” Krohn describes having “ecstatic experiences” while reading poetry at a young age. She studied theoretical philosophy, general psychology, and art history at the University of Helsinki in the late sixties and decided early on that writing was the way to marry her varied interests.
Krohn’s work is often categorized as science fiction or fantasy. While her stories do tend toward the speculative—artificial intelligence, transhumanism, otherworldly metropolises—Krohn doesn’t see herself as a genre writer. There “are elements of science fiction and dystopia in my work,” she acknowledged, but in addition to the lyric poetry that influenced her when she was young, today she finds herself influenced by “all prose that is also poetry and philosophy.” Nevertheless, Krohn recognizes the value of science fiction and fantasy to her creative process: she compares such works to the daemon-like entities of Finnish folklore called etiäinen. “They are phantom doubles that precede a person—in that they can anticipate, predict and warn,” she explained. “They are tools with which to poke small peepholes into the mist shrouding the future.”
Krohn is fascinated and troubled by the ways that we comprehend reality, and the ways that we fail to do so. “Every computer is now like a neuron in a neural network encompassing the globe,” she wrote in one of her emails. “At best, it will be the next leap in evolution. At worst, it will combine the various absurdities of artificial and human intelligence.” The risk, as Krohn sees it, is that we will lose control of our creation and it will become a tool of “subjugation.” Krohn’s skepticism toward official accounts of reality extends to some serious specifics: in a piece published on the website kaapeli.fi, and dated September 11, 2005, Krohn questions “The 9/11 Commission Report” and cites the work of David Ray Griffin, whose books on the subject are popular with 9/11 truthers. “I do not nominate myself for a truth movement activist,” Krohn told me; still, she is doubtful that the media has accurately portrayed what really happened to the World Trade Center towers, and why. “The media picks a reality for us and hypnotizes us into believing it," Krohn said. “We have to use both our sense and sensibility, when we choose in what we trust.”
Even when working with fantastical elements, Krohn is perpetually attentive to what different forms of information—intuitions, the Internet, the inner lives of other creatures—can reveal to us about ourselves. To this end, the consciousnesses of non-human species figure prominently in her work. One of the most moving passages in the “Collected Fiction” concerns the inner lives of dogs, and in particular the inner life of an old dog named Faith. “Their lives are balancing acts between a humanized being and an older, wilder nature,” Krohn writes. “Dogs are interstitial beings, not yet human, but no longer wolves. That is the unresolved paradox of doghood.”
In the short, lyrical story “Tainaron,” another unnamed narrator wanders through the eponymous city, which is populated by insects. The narrator is guided by a friend, whom she knows as Longhorn, and as she encounters the city’s various denizens, she begins to reminisce about her life before she came to Tainaron. At one point, she watches a cult of self-immolating insects try to cleanse the sins of the world by throwing themselves on a bonfire. Krohn’s narrator is horrified, at first, but she continues to watch: “Last night was calm, the sacrifice burned evenly. It was a candle on the table, the night’s focus and its terrible purifier. Who was he who was burning with such a high and unwavering flame.… And I had gazed on the blaze as if it were a midnight flower, rejoicing!”
I asked Krohn what the lives of insects could teach us about ourselves. “One of humankind’s great illusions is the belief in the total superiority of Homo sapiens over other species,” she replied. “Humans aren’t the only ones with language. In an anthill, information necessary for the existence of the colony reaches all of the inhabitants with unbelievable speed.… An ant colony can be seen as a kind of superorganism, like a data network. There is nothing more important to humans than our own consciousness,” Krohn continued. “It is our only tool for interpreting and studying reality. However, I think that consciousness is spread throughout space-time, varying in density and depth, and that it will possibly develop in computers and new generations of robots.”
The robot that wants to attain personhood is one of science fiction’s most persistent tropes. In many such stories, humans push robots toward self-actualization. Krohn gives us a different version. In “Gorgonoids,” a scientist becomes infatuated with insect-like computer-generated life forms. The gorgonoids “always stay in their own world,” she marvels. “They cannot approach us, and we cannot approach them.” She begins to identify with them. “My life began to thin out strangely, to empty as if from the inside. I began to become detached, abstracted. I still had a body, and my body had mass, but I was conscious of its existence only momentarily.”
Krohn herself sometimes sees self-awareness as a kind of affliction. The title character of the novel “Umbra” is a doctor who one day receives a strange request from a married couple. Their home robot, it appears, has started to experience fear. Like the scientist in “Gorgonoids,” Umbra is not certain that being more human is something the android should evolve toward. “Stay in the kingdom of pure abstraction,” he implores. - Peter Bebergal
Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction is a collection that introduces a wide range of English-language readers to the author for the first time. The collection contains a range of her works, from novels such as Pereat Mundus, The Pelican’s New Clothes, Tainaron: Mail From Another City and a number of short stories, as well as some critical essays.
We had a chance to chat with Jeff Vandermeer, who oversaw the editing and translation of Collected Fiction.When did you first read Leena Krohn’s fiction, and what about her writing style appealed to you?
What distinguishes Krohn’s stories, and by extension, the larger body of Finnish speculative fiction from what else is out there?
Finnish writers typically have a good eye for nature and write in an interesting way about the natural world. I don’t mean that they write nature narratives, but that in their stories there’s an awareness of ecology and of nature that is very sophisticated and interesting. This isn’t true of all Finnish writers, but several have told me it is a major theme. Some of Johanna Sinisalo’s novels share this propensity, and I think it’s a timely focus, given the uncertainties of climate change and our need to redefine our relationship to our environment. And certainly Nordic fiction in general seems of use in this sense—look at the work of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck or the poetry of Aase Berg. You can also see this in Finnish Weird, which readers can sample in two lovely downloads. Hopefully with the World SF Convention being hosted by Helsinki in 2017, more English-language readers will encounter the wealth of great Finnish writing out there.
I grew up in Fiji, surrounded by a very complex ecosystem, and everywhere I’ve been I’ve found a great deal of solace and reflection in the natural world. It is, in fact, the world we live in, even as we’ve transformed so much. When we forget that—and we forget too much, too many times—we lose a pretty vital connection. It’s not a fluke that research says going for a walk or hike in nature is soothing and settling. We also share this world with so many creatures more sophisticated than we are…and that is their world. Understanding this is now vital to our own survival on this planet.
Cheeky Frawg Books has published several translations recently: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagganath comes to mind. What goes into translating these works?
Sometimes it is a matter of the author translating their own work into English or writing some fiction in English directly, as with Tidbeck. Sometimes, as with the Leena Krohn Collected Fiction, we acquire rights to existing out-of-print translations and supplement that with new translations by a variety of translators. Collected Fiction has 8 or 9 translators, and we enlisted the help of Finnish fiction writers like Viivi Hyvonen and Leena Likitalo, who we felt would bring their writerly sensibilities to the job. J. Robert Tupasela provided additional translations and served as a consulting editor. And Hildi Hawkins was a stalwart—in that most existing translations of Krohn’s work had been by her. Then, of course, you check your work with the writer. So the larger projects it’s more like editing an anthology—a lot of moving parts and decisions to make.
What role do you see translated speculative fiction playing the larger genre pool?
The Krohn project, all 850 pages of it, has taken up so much of our time that I can’t even think ahead that far. But I would point readers to both Pasi Jääskeläinen’s recent Rabbit Back Literature Society and Johanna Sinisalo’s forthcoming The Core of the Sun (Grove Press).
Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction Part 2: Stories and Appreciations
Iconic Finnish writer Leena Krohn Krohn writes eloquently, passionately, about the nature of reality, the nature of Nature, and what it means to be human. One of Finland's most iconic writers, translated into many languages, and winner of the prestigious Finlandia Prize, Krohn has had an incredibly distinguished career. Collected Fiction: Part 2 provides readers with a rich sampling of short stories and novel excerpts. Appreciations of Krohn's work by Desirina Boskovich, Matthew Cheney, and Minna Jerrman are also included—as is Krohn's own afterword. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson, and Italo Calvino.
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