the doll’s alphabet [camilla grudova]

It felt appropriate to be reading Grudova’s strange stories in Mexico, the North American antipode to her native Canada. The skulls, the stitched-up painted faces, the anthropomorphism are all elements her stories and the country have in common. Grudova constructs her gothic universe across the course of the book’s thirteen stories, some brief, some more extended. The book is full of slightly vulnerable female narrators, whose relationships with the opposite sex are rarely straightforward. It’s perhaps a book to be dipped in and out of; sometimes there’s a feeling of repetitiveness as the same tropes reappear. If you like Saunders and Kafka and surrealism, The Doll’s Alphabet will probably delight.