The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova
2022; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2022.0059
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
ResumoReviewed by: The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova Kolby Harvey (bio) the doll’s alphabet Camilla Grudova Coffee House Press https://coffeehousepress.org/products/the-dolls-alphabet 176 pages; Print, $15.95 Camilla Grudova’s debut collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, reads like a seventy-five-year-old grocery list pulled from a box in the attic of an abandoned house: the form is familiar, but, lacking the context of the conditions surrounding its making, the content perplexes us. Grudova’s stories are themselves lists, catalogs of a broken world and its decaying institutions. While we recognize some of the items on these lists (sewing machines), others feel otherworldly, not quite real (whole canned piglets in jelly). Grudova’s characters all seem to inhabit the same gray universe, each trapped in one way or another by forces of exploitive labor, poverty, and misogyny. In “Waxy,” her narrator navigates a series of drab quotidian horrors day after day: after grueling work in “the Factory,” she frequents cafés in hopes of capturing the affections of a “Man,” preferably one with “enough Exam prize money and [who] also want[s] to have children,” to avoid dying [End Page 113] in a back-alley abortion, as the “Manless” so often do in her town. Outside a café, she meets Paul, a sickly young man with incontinence issues. And what an image Grudova creates here, a lucid distillation of (hetero)sexism—so dismal it is to go at it alone that a woman would elect to hitch her future to an unknown dude pissing in his own pants. Throughout the collection, in fact, Grudova demonstrates a talent for satirizing our world’s obsession with enshrining mediocre men. Peter, from “The Mouse Queen,” perfectly embodies the smug phoniness of a certain type of college student, those condescending men who hide their wealthy backgrounds to project airs of authenticity. The titular character of “Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead” deceives his wife for years before deciding to “die” one day, committing himself to an open casket in a church where his wife and housemates can dote on him, bringing him food and presents while he simply exists. Reading The Doll’s Alphabet, I tried to piece together the disparate bits of Grudova’s dour world to form some sense of its history. In the collection’s final story, “Notes from a Spider,” diary entries describe scores of men living in the narrator’s city who are “deformed by the guns and cannons of the last war, who only have one or two limbs left.” It is the fallout of this war that the rest of the book’s characters must navigate, eking out some semblance of a living as the world crumbles around them. “Rhinoceros,” whose opening scene reads like a riff on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (two people sip drinks sadly in a train station), follows two such characters as they make their way across a semi-inhabited town to buy art supplies, stopping to loot snacks from an empty grocery store along the way. Twice the story describes barnyard animals as mysterious entities that clearly no longer exist. First, through the narrator’s response to a drawing on a bag of candy (“Everyone knew what a rabbit was, even if they’d never seen one”), we learn that rabbits have disappeared from the local ecosystem. The narrator’s mystified response to another food package reveals that agriculture as we know it has also ceased to function. In a scene reminiscent of Yoko Tawada’s “Das Fremde aus der Dose,” she sees a drawing of a cow on a can labeled “beef ” and concludes that the animal itself is “a beef.” What happened to bovines and bunnies is never explained, or really even hinted at, aside from the specter of a bygone war. Clearly, Grudova’s is a book that demands to be read on its own terms, as [End Page 114] evidenced by the collection’s eponymous story. Consisting of a single enigmatic sentence, “The Doll’s Alphabet” forms the cipher to an encoded message the reader never receives. I got the impression that somehow this one sentence held the key...
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