“It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited.”
The obvious stand-out in Camilla Grudova’s first collection is ‘Waxy’, but it is ‘Rhinoceros’ I think about the most, maybe because I read it around the same time as John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? A tin of meat. An empty zoo. A “pink lump” without mouth or eyes or hands but “alive”, emerging out of the protagonist as she lies in a bathtub. Something unnameable happens when Grudova places these images together. Her world is so peculiar yet familiar (to my mind, very English – strange, considering she is a Canadian living in Scotland), and I love being inside it even as it makes me feel a bit sick.
Collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017
A Personal Anthology 