Biographical information about Camilla Grudova is scant, confined to three lines of text on the inside sleeve of this book, her first. She lives in Toronto, has a degree in Art History and German, and has had stories published in Granta and the White Review. But why would one want to know more? There’s plenty going on in her stories.
The 13 collected here are compared on the back flap to Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. This is a fairly obvious comparison: Grudova’s stories are weird, can be seen to have a feminist agenda, have recurring motifs such as dolls and wolves, and she lives in Canada.
“Weird”, though, isn’t the half of it. The first story, “Unstitching”, begins like this: “One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself. Her clothes, skin and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of a fruit, and her true body stepped out.”
This is a not atypical couple of sentences, as it turns out. Deadpan, after lulling us with a banality she presents us with uncomfortable surrealisms, the kind that make us ask, “What is she getting at?” and which in the hands of some writers can make us feel as though we are being got at, or subjected to some kind of gothic whimsy. In an imaginative world where everything is permitted, everything can be boring.
That isn’t the case here. I did at first fear the worst excesses of magic realism, which can be like playing with a child who changes the rules every few seconds, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a consistency to her imagination.
To take the longest story, “Waxy” (28 pages), as representative: in it a society is imagined in which women are pitied and censured if they do not have Men (the word is capitalised). The women toil in factories, and often lose their hair or have discoloured skin because of the chemicals they work with; the Men earn money by taking Exams, for which they study by reading Philosophy Books (capitalised, never explained further). The diet is rudimentary or faintly disgusting: toast, with or without Golden Syrup; boiled tinned meat, beef cubes, gherkins, tinned peaches. Men must register to take Exams; if they do not, their neighbours can blackmail them, especially if – as happens here – their women have children. The narrator’s Man, Paul, is beautiful but has little control of his bladder. Particularly worrying about this dystopia is the way it is not some never-never land: people listen to recordings of Wagner and Tchaikovsky. It is an immiserated society for both sexes, as each are slotted into immutable roles: that might be the lesson here.
I started searching for an imaginative correlative to Grudova’s stories fairly quickly. Before too long, I thought I had it: David Lynch’s eerie first feature-length film, Eraserhead: a monochrome nightmare, but not without its humorous touches. The idea took form even before I came across the baby in “Waxy”: the narrator gives birth to a child who is, like the baby in Lynch’s film, deformed. Here, though, it is treated tenderly. Not everything is awful for Grudova.
There are, as I said, motifs. Dolls, sewing machines, pregnancy, incontinence and a kind of archaeological culture pop up from time to time: by that I mean threadbare survivors of an older time. One character’s shelves are stocked with green and red Loebs (the repositories of classical wisdom, Greek and Latin respectively); she marries a man whose hair is slicked back “like a young Samuel Beckett”; the church has a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.
• The Doll’s Alphabet is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
• This article was amended on 10 February 2017. An earlier version used the word “corollary” where “correlative” was meant.
