Doña Quixote and Other Citizens / Gold of Ophir
Leena Krohn makes her English-language debut here with two books in one:
Doña Quixote and Other Citizens and Gold of Ophir.
These are tales from cities in which life is lived under threat of great disaster.
Doña Quixote's reality, that of a modern city, is built up out of a series of portraits centering on the mysterious main character, whose presence is like a flame, drawing the dispossessed of the city to her.
Gold of Ophir, with its rich fusion of the language and imagery of science, alchemy and the Old Testament, makes a more mythic approach to the city.
Consisting of tiny fragments of poetic prose, both books use fantasy to address the enigmatic relationship between reality and consciousness, and their endless interaction.
For Leena Krohn, art and literature are 'a yardstick to measure the infinite complexity of life'. Krohn's controlled and lucid writing finds its space in the borderland between fact and fiction, between the short story and the novella.
Leena Krohn
Leena Krohn (born 1947) is one of the most distinctive and guileless geniuses of contemporary Finnish literature. She has written poetry, children's books, novels, fables, short stories, essays and texts that combine all the aforementioned genres with the possibilities of science and fantasy.
Unlike with other Finnish writers in general, the history of the country's literature provides no easy model for Krohn. In Krohn's production, fable-like contents serve philosophic and metaphysical ends, while on the other hand its scientific aspects may be viewed jointly as a subgenre of fantasy and fable.
The novel Tainaron: Mail from another city (1985) consists of a series of letters sent beyond the sea from a city of insects. Doña Quixote and other citizens (1983)
and Gold of Ophir (1987)
ase also translated in English.,
Krohn's books have been translated into English, Swedish, Estonian, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Latvian, French, and Norwegian.
More books by Leena Krohn
