Reviewing Camilla Grudova The Doll's Alphabet is a challenge for me. I found most of the stories to be well written, but they left a very bad taste in my mouth. This collection is often described as a cross between Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. (I would say that in fact quite a number hearken back to the original Grimm fairy tales where terrible things happen all the time, often not only to people who "deserve" them.)
I suppose I should indicate there are plot SPOILERS below.
Most of the stories have extensive surreal moments, such as when a dead man communicates to his wife via letters (he seems most upset that he didn't get a fur-lined coffin) or when a boy's fingers turn into fish. The first story, "Unstitching," sets the tone for the collection where women learn to unstitch their skin and let their inner selves (sort of a cross between a metallic insect and a sewing machine) free. Soon all women are doing this, though men are not able to, as they do not have true secret selves inside. Those that try wound themselves terribly with razors, all to no avail. Most of the other stories feature sewing machines or discuss sewing as something that women do to try to make enough money to enable them to have a baby.
In many of the stories, there is an oppressive social order that is never fully explained. It is just the way things are. "Waxy" has by far the most elaborate set-up, where women work at a Factory of one type or another, supporting the Man in the household, who is supposed to take Exams. Needless to say, a Man who does particularly well on his Exam will often trade up to another woman. This simplified gloss on the story makes it sound like a rip-off of The Handmaid's Tale, though Grudova focuses on a couple where the Man doesn't have official status and can't take Exams. It actually gets considerably darker from there, but I won't go into more details. "The Mouse Queen" also gets quite dark at the end when a woman, abandoned by her fairly useless husband, turns into a wolf and apparently eats up her twin children.
One thing that is quite disturbing is that when women (at least the ones featured in the stories) give birth in these stories, they either give birth to a part of a baby (like an ear) or a horrible quasi-mummified thing, like in David Lynch's Eraserhead, while the most "normal" children get eaten up. In general, the natural order of things is disrupted in these stories, almost as if the whole world has been poisoned and humans are in the last throes of existence. That is certainly my take on "Rhinoceros" where no large animals seem to have survived and zoos stand emptied. On the other hand, in other stories mice and various bugs (moths, ants, cockroaches and especially spiders) still exist, so it isn't like the entire food chain has been eliminated. Nonetheless, in many of these stories, the main things to eat are ancient (and often spoiled) tins of fruit, vegetables or even canned meat, hinting that there has been some large scale disaster in the fairly recent past.
These stories are like little windows into a horrible, decaying world with a secret core, but the secret core is still more corrupted and evil. This reminded me somewhat of Croenenberg's Naked Lunch, though the obsessive observations of bric-a-brac (and the ever-present mechanical sewing machines) with many stories set in or involving antique stores, seemed to parallel the inner world of a Jan Švankmajer film, such as Alice. As should be clear, I didn't like this trip into Grudova's imagination and won't be returning, but of course it might be much more to your taste.
No comments:
Post a Comment