Author: Soila Lehtonen
Strange and familiar
Issue 1/1986 | Archives online, Authors
Leena Krohn. Photo: Katri Lassila
Tainaron is the name of the rocky headland from which the road to Hades starts. 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. 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’. The narrator of the book writes letters to her friend back in our world.
The inhabitants of Tainaron are different from us – they have the bodies of insects. 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’. Among the dedicatees of Krohn’s book is the well-known entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. More…
Contrapuntal dialogue
Issue 2/1985 | Archives online, Authors
Pirkko Saisio. Photo: Laura Malmivaara
Pirkko Saisio (born 1949) is the author of five novels and a number of plays. Her first novel, Elämänmeno (‘Way of life’), appeared in 1975, when she was a young actress just graduated from the Finnish Theatre School, appearing in rep at Rovaniemi Theatre. By the time her next novel, Sisarukset (‘Sibling’), was published in 1976, Saisio had moved back to her native Helsinki and was working as a freelance writer and actress.
In addition to three stage plays, she has also adapted three of her novels for stage or television: Elämänmeno was shown on television in 1978 and Sisarukset in 1980, and the KOM Theatre staged its own highly acclaimed interpretation of her novel Betoniyö (‘Concrete night’, 1981) in 1982. Last year Saisio published a new novel, Kainin tytär (‘Daughter of Cain’), whose absence from the Finlandia Prize shortlist astonished many critics. In March her play Hävinneiden legenda (‘Legend of the lost’) was published as a book and staged at the KOM Theatre. Saisio herself appeared in the production, playing, among others, the role of Joan of Arc. In May she was awarded a Government Literature Prize for Kainin tytär. More…