Camilla Grudova

Surreal, ambitious, and exquisitely conceived, The Doll's Alphabetis a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark.
In Unstitching, a feminist revolution takes place. In Waxy, a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In Agata's Machine, two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In Notes from a Spider, a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city.
By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.

The Doll's Alphabet

Amna A.

This book was so haunting. I enjoyed being grossed and creeped out by it. There are 13 short stories, all are weird in the way that casual dreams tend to be. Not full on surreal. It didn't feel forced, but like a dream in which everything seems normal until you wake up and recount the dream and realise how slightly off everything was. 

There were many recurring themes and references across the stories, the most prominent one was the sewing machine being a source of unease. In one story, there was a revolution in which women "unstitch" their skin to reveal sewing machine-like machinery underneath. In another story, a sewing machine-like invention is the source of unhealthy obsession and addiction. Even the stories with no relation to sewing machines, there would be a sewing machine factory in the backdrop of a sickly dystopian industrialist society. In another story, a sewing machine-like invention is the source of unhealthy obsession and addiction. 

There were also many references to children's classic literature and mentions of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. The short stories are written in a way that's reminiscent of childrens dark fairytales and contain characters and events that may as well have been pulled out of some and distorted in a gruesome way.

“There are shades of David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter in this collection of feminist allegories and surreal skits” (The Guardian). Dolls, mirrors, tinned foods, malfunctioning bodies—the seemingly banal quickly turns unsettling in this debut story collection. A woman laments having to send her children to daycare before turning into a wolf and eating them both in “The Mouse Queen.” “Waxy” explores a dystopian world where failure to register for exams can result in blackmail. And in “Unstitching,” a woman unstitches her own body to reveal her new form, which resembles a sewing machine. With the thirteen stories collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova proves herself to be “a canny collage artist with an eye for the comically macabre.” While Grudova draws “her images from Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics . . . her ironies and insights about the inequalities in relationships between men and women feel startlingly current (Publishers Weekly).

Lindy

When I finished reading this book I gave it three stars, but four months later I'm going back and adding another star on the basis that specific images from the stories are still vivid in my mind to the point I can smell them. Grudova's aesthetics unmoored in history and geography but that nonetheless strongly evoke (to me anyway) the desolation of northern England between the World Wars are well developed and singular.

Like the lovechild of Jeff VanderMeer and Terry Gilliam: surreal, evocative, affecting and shot through with dark humour (even the slapstick was black). The characters and their concerns are grounded in harsh (often) physical reality, but that sometimes visceral and sensual environment is reflected through prisms and distorted fairground mirrors until it has become something else. I loved its imagination and its fearlessness, its commentary on the status of women and its utter madness. I might add Kafka, Leonora Carrington and Ithel Colquhoun in that genetic mix as well…

The Doll's Alphabet

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