Camilla Grudova is probably my favorite writer working today. Her two excellent short story collections (The Doll’s Alphabet, which I will focus on here, and The Coiled Serpent) are strange and textural, anchored by various obsessively treated motifs — sewing machines, powdered custard, tinned food in general, wolves, saunas. It’s delightful to see moments of repetition across her stories, to ask why this repetition might matter. One thing that strikes me about what tends to repeat across Grudova’s stories is her focus on objects, often commodified objects. Her deep attention to objects results in a written world that is crammed with old things, soiled things, trash — but the perspectives that frame the stories tend to enchant these things, to invest them with vitality and meaning. I think it is, in part, her expression of this tension that an object carries, between meaningful thing and detritus, that draws me to her work. And objects are points of contact with history, too — this means that the past, in Grudova’s writing, also carries this tension.
The story ‘The Gothic Society’, which I keep meaning to copy out and tape to the wall above my desk, is perhaps a good entry point here. Only a page long, it details the mysterious appearance of various gothic flourishes in some city:
‘A woman discovered that a bunch of her jewels had faces carved into them, someone else a gargoyle tattoo on their back, and a car was found with three stone kings sitting inside’.
Certain among these gothic excrescences are removed again and again, only to come back, like some growth of mold. We are given no resolution on the identities of the perpetrators, no manifesto for this so-called ‘society’. Only this:
The Gothic Society was compared to zebra mussels, to leprosy, to feral cats and urban foxes. Its members were never identified.
This idea of the flourishes of a historic aesthetic movement as invasive species, or disease, as well as the tenuous connection of these flourishes to human agency that mostly manifests in empty space and unanswered questions, thrilled me when I first read the story. I could imagine the aesthetic markers of the gothic as self-replicating motifs, divorced from context or meaning. The past gets scrambled, it washes up onshore in weird bits, it shows up in decontextualized or dissonant images. It builds up and crowds in, and there is far, far too much of it for sensemaking.
But things get more complicated when people get involved. People in Grudova’s stories are fascinated with the past, mostly through its aesthetic markers. They like the look of green and red Loeb books standing next to each other on the bookshelf. They’re attracted to shops that sell old things. Hemmed in on all sides by detritus, they are still drawn to individual objects:
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… I had encountered the word ‘beef’ in novels before.
The speaker here, in the story ‘Rhinocerus’, is living in some post-collapse landscape where goods are scarce and animals seem to be entirely extinct. The image on the rotted can of tinned beef is an object of wonder for the story’s central couple — Nicholas, an artist, makes a drawing of it so that the two can look at it when they like. This kind of scrounging for meaning and enchantment in a fragmented image of the past always, to my mind, strikes a poignant note in Grudova’s stories. Yet the past itself is never explored as narrative — instead, it is scattered around the characters through these objects and signs. This lopping off of narrative in favor of object feels like a deeply felt engagement with materiality in time to me. Objects sag and rot and discolor — that’s how they register time. People pick out these objects and throw them away, or fetishize them. It’s brilliant that Grudova allows for these two reactions to overlap.
I’ll end with this: in the story ‘The Mermaid’, there is a character who has to choose between studying classics at a top university or marrying the proprietor of an antique shop called ‘Old Time Things’. She chooses the antique shop.