Alwynne's Reviews > The Doll's Alphabet

Camilla Grudova’s short fiction’s set in suffocating spaces of the weird and the uncanny. They draw from a rich array of influences, like makeshift ragbag assemblages gleaned from the remnants of folk tales and classic speculative fiction. Some like “Waxy” and “Edward, Do not Pamper the Dead” take place in dystopian universes somehow devoid of nature, where society is rigidly ordered, housing is limited and food is scarce, what remains is processed or rancid, and vast swathes of animals are extinct – like an extreme vision of a post-climate-change world. In “Waxy” women are trapped by their gender, bred to be helpers for their men, and to live out their days on factory assembly lines; while “The Mouse Queen” and “The Mermaid” are variations on traditional fairy tales, feminist fables of metamorphosis and rage.

Grudova revels in decay and dilapidation which she blends with the surreal and the fantastical: oozing, stinking bodies; sewing machines that produce psychic films reminiscent of spirit photography; creepy, battered dolls, an array of tawdry yet magical detritus. There’s a strong visual element to her work, presumably connected to her background in art history. Reading her collection felt like an encounter with the verbal equivalents of Dubuffet’s Art Brut. The settings and the carefully-compiled lists of near-totemic objects that appear over and over again in her stories conjure images that share a lineage with the outsider art of late 19th and early 20th century asylums. The title piece “Unstitching” with its hints of Kafka, the repetition of sewing machines, allusions to processes of making and unmaking, that surface in numerous stories, recalled the work of seamstress Agnes Richter who lived out her days in a Dresden mental hospital stitching and unstitching an elaborate jacket representing her life.

As with any collection, I found some entries more potent or convincing than others. Sometimes Grudova’s narratives fall flat, the ideas too thinly spread, or her fascination with the grotesque too forced or overly self-indulgent. But I responded to her highly referential, collage-like style and there were countless small details that really appealed - for instance the scenes featuring what must be deliberate nods to the films of the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer. I particularly enjoyed “The Moth Emporium” with a protagonist who seems to have migrated from the pages of Angela Carter via Barbara Comyns. I was fascinated too by the menacing, malevolent narrator in Notes from a Spider a curious hybrid of man and Louise Bourgeois style spider; whose experiences take place in a strangely familiar post-WW1 city, an almost Prague or almost Vienna, where the monstrous has openly merged with the everyday.

Note: I have the Fitzcarraldo Edition but the American edition includes a useful list of Grudova’s literary influences:

The Doll’s Alphabet was inspired by: • Edward Gorey, Amphigorey Again • Barbara Comyns, Sisters by a River • Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual • T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays • Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor • Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks • Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop • Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories • Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse