‘Unstitching’ by Camilla Grudova

A feminist revolution in a tiny space and that’s all a feminist insurgency needs. Two pages and one line. A woman decides to ‘unstitch’ her whole skin after a cup of coffee one random afternoon. It sets a domino chain in action of other women doing the same. “Her clothes, skin and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of fruit, and her true body stepped out.” The men aren’t happy, of course, because they don’t know what they’re now looking at or dealing with. “When Greta’s husband came home he was horrified. He had never touched her sewing machine before – it frightened him – and he would certainly not touch Greta’s newly discovered body.” The details become increasingly bizarre, but serenely so, until later in the story sewing machines are outlawed and the evolution towards full unstitching consciousness begins. It’s magic-realism you can both imagine and happily fail to imagine. I remember when this book came out, people were quietly in awe. It’s one of those stories that signed me up as a reader of Grudova’s work for life.

First published in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ by Camilla Grudova

Teetering between comically pathetic and genuinely heartwrenching, this story recounts the surreal picaresque existence of a seemingly inanimate object, born from the chance encounter of an octopus with the mermaid on the prow of a decommissioned ship. The sconce is stolen by USSR soldiers, sexually mistreated, sold, sold again and so on until even the author loses sight of him. He has emotions like loneliness, pain and longing for his mother but no control over his destiny. The bizarre footnotes about a boy with sardines for fingers and women finding severed fingers in sausage tins also enhance the sense that this is a world in which anything can happen to anyone regardless of whether they are believed. The tale captures with great acuity the sensation of living through history both as spectator and unwilling participant.

First published in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Rhinoceros’ by Camilla Grudova

“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

‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ by Camilla Grudova

The atmosphere, characters, humour and aesthetic of each story in Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet are so consistent that the collection could almost be read as a jumbled novel occurring in some weird universe where women unstitch themselves and mate with sewing machines and keep tuber-like babies in the fridge. Short form allows not only the writer but the reader, too, breathing space which perhaps wouldn’t be possible in a novel, and sometimes we need a breather – these stories are pretty intense. I love the wit and imagination they display – the world they describe is characterised by a craziness and an exuberance worthy of Kafka and ‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ is possibly the most beautifully exuberant of them all.

First published in Eleven Eleven Journal, 2016 and collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019

‘Agata’s Machine’ by Camilla Grudova

Transgressive, unboundaried female sexuality colours and textures everything about this story, so it feels like a kind of second cousin, though decades removed, to The Doll. It also recalls that horrible D H Lawrence story ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ so strongly that I wouldn’t be surprised if Grudova said this was a modern retelling, or more likely, a rebuff. It comes from a superb, dense collection published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Doll’s Alphabet, which name I take as further proof of du Maurier’s ghost looking over Grudova’s shoulder.

First published online in The White Review here. Collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017