Maybe I am not too bright but I tried to pick apart Camilla Grudova’s stories but in the end I just sat back and enjoyed them.
Reading Grudova’s quirky tales took me back to the time when I first read George Saunders Pastoralia. Grudova manages to be funny and disturbing within the same sentence and every story in this collection is bizarre. Within The Doll’s Alphabet be prepared to meet werewolves, clowns, dirty people , humanoid spiders, a businessman who carried his belongings in tin cans, dystopian lit and tons more and all are told in Grudova’s stye which is reminiscent of Patty Yumi Cottrell and Otessa Moshfegh.
Although I did say that I could not understand what some of the symbols stood for, I can say that the majority of these stories have a feminist message. Nearly all the characters are females who overpower males or try improve their eccentricities but really it’s best to let Grudova’s singular prose envelope you and let the stories take on their wildly shifting shapes.
The Bobsphere 