"Datura is luminous-at once a secret history of losers, dreamers, and quacks, and a lyrical argument on the nature of reality. Where will it all end? Pushed by the mysterious owner of the magazine, our narrator may wind up somewhere very strange indeed. Especially when the legendary Voynich Manuscript is involved.
Especially if you're eating datura seeds. From a sunrise of automated cars working in silent precision to a possible vampire, she discovers that reality may not be as logical as you think-and that people are both odder and more ordinary as they might seem. From the author of the World Fantasy Award finalist Tainaron, one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation.Our narrator works as an editor and writer for a magazine specializing in bringing oddities to light, a job that sends her exploring through a city that becomes by degrees ever less familiar. (Nov.Datura by Leena Krohn, translated by Anna Volmari and Juha Tupasela. Aficionados of the surreal will find this a contemporary masterwork.
The absurdist antilogic of nightmare colors this parable of elegant chaos and denies readers moral comfort or clear resolution. Shadows of Kafka and Strindberg are infused with Krohn’s love of her fragile characters. Chance, advocate of paranormal coincidence, and an old woman running just ahead of the narrator are embodiments of overlapping realities shaping her transforming awareness. Perception, the faulty tool by which we define reality, dissolves. Are they hallucinations or denizens of other dimensions? Is the datura plant responsible, or is it the enigmatic Voynich manuscript, a secret key to reality penned by Roger Bacon? A slew of sympathetic, disturbing grotesques attack the narrator’s equilibrium, including the Master of Sound, a detector of silent sounds, and the Hair Artiste, whose dead son’s photograph changes to show the shadow of wings. When the unnamed narrator, the sickly editor of fringe journal the New Anomalist, ingests toxic datura seeds, she is bombarded by perceptions of phantoms, vampires, and alarming eccentrics. Krohn subverts traditional philosophical and literary expectations in this episodic novel of fluid reality.
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