Sunday, August 10, 2014

Tainaron

I picked up Tainaron as part of a "weird fiction" ebook sale, not having heard of it before. By Finnish author Leena Krohn, it is written as a series of letters from an unnamed person staying in the city of Tainaron. Tainaron is a city populated by insects, and it is implied that the writer is human. The letters are to a lover or friend back in the writer's home city, and a lot is left unexplained. It's a fascinating novel, and hard to understand exactly what is going on, as a lot of things are hinted at or implied. It's never made clear exactly what the writer is doing in Tainaron - why they're there, or how long they plan to be there. The letters are soaked in the melancholy of homesickness and the strangeness of living in a foreign city, made more explicit by the nonhuman nature of the city's inhabitants.

No comments: