![]() ![]() Tainaron may be the beginning of the road to Hades, but it is part of our own world. ![]() In this fantasy Krohn never points the moral finger, never seeks to educate. However, instead of drawing the parallels between the curiosities of insect life and those of human existence that are so familiar from other literature, instead of creating swift and telling allegories, Krohn gives her characters a life of their own, in which human existence is not presented as necessarily the crowning glory of nature, nor is it naively regarded as essentially no different from the animal kingdom. Among the dedicatees of Krohn’s book is the well-known entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. ![]() In the street the letter-writer encounters a character whose ‘antennae wave above his muzzle-like face’, the café waiter’s mouth ‘protrudes from his face like that of a dragonfly grub’ and when her friend and mentor, Longhorn Beetle, smiles, it is ‘a slow sideways extension of the jaws to the two sides of his head’. The inhabitants of Tainaron are different from us – they have the bodies of insects. The narrator of the book writes letters to her friend back in our world. ![]() On the title page of Tainaron is this epigraph: ‘You are not in a place the place is in you.’ The book’s subtitle is ‘Letters from another town’. Leena Krohn has borrowed her book’s title from Greek mythology: the city of Tainaron lies in the volcanic region, on the banks of Okeanos. Tainaron is the name of the rocky headland from which the road to Hades starts. ![]()
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