The Doll’s Alphabet

Camilla Grudova

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017
Genre: Short Stories
Pages: 192 pages

Surreal, ambitious and exquisitely conceived, The Doll’s Alphabet is 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.

Learn more: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-dolls-alphabet/

‘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.’

Nick Lezard, Guardian

‘The comic grotesqueries that emerge from this collection owe a bit to Dickens, Kafka and Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Der Struwwelpeter,” but their total effect is delightfully unclassifiable…. The Doll’s Alphabet is clearly a revisionist undertaking. It unsettles assumptions about motherhood and marriage. But it also separates itself from its feminist predecessors. The world it inhabits – droll, inexplicable and even beautiful in its slovenly fashion – is unlike any other I’ve encountered.’

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

‘The Doll’s Alphabet … has already garnered comparisons to Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Leonora Carrington, Ben Marcus, and Franz Kafka. To this list let me add another name: George Orwell. Not the dystopian Orwell of 1984 or the allegorical Orwell of Animal Farm but the down-and-out, grubby-oilcloth Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Grudova does mermaids and magic, but she also does moldy, dingy, scratch-and-sniff interiors that reek of cabbage and old shoes.’

Christine Smallwood, Harper’s Magazine

Camilla Grudova

Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh. She holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta.