Ursula Scavenius, The Dolls, Trans. from the
Danish by Jennifer
Russell, Lolli editions, 2021
Stories from a world both fantastically strange and gruellingly
familiar where isolation, ruin, prejudice, and misinformation soar in
an irresistible, susurrant fugue of displaced families yearning to
belong
In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by
unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and
environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement.
Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with
memory loss is on the run and offered shelter by Notpla, a man both
an ally and an enemy. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with
their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of
their mother’s story.
Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej
Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Béla Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch,
Scavenius’s universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive. In
it, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can
be propaganda today.
Read the story ‘Compartment’ on Granta.com
“Here is a writer of extremely unusual imaginative powers. I found
myself completely entranced. This is one of the most extraordinary
pieces of writing I've ever read.”– Editor’s Pick Open Book,
BBC Radio 4
“From a Rear
Window-like position, a girl in a wheelchair watches extremely
sinister happenings at a refugee centre with her complicit parents
while her sister refuses to leave the basement of their house. A
woman seeks refuge from the ever-present threat of war or the chaos
of climate change with a man whose identity is as unclear as his
intentions… These are artful, singular stories which, with rigorous
inventiveness of language and technique, vividly evoke the calamities
that form our nightmares.”– The Irish Times
“Fiercely
anti-establishment and addictively macabre. The translation is
appropriately atmospheric: Jennifer Russell has done a marvellous job
of weaving the narrative seamlessly between an almost dreamlike
lyricism and a grisly reality.”– Translating Women
"Generally in
quite a lot of short story collections, you prefer one story over the
other but I absolutely adored each and every story because all of
them are extremely strong, independent stories and doing their own
things."- Allaying Art -Literature and cinema
“The story
Compartment reminded me of Guy de Maupassant crossed with Kafka:
Three siblings have to carry their dead mother with them on a train
heading out of Russia and towards Hungary so that they find a decent
burial area.”
“These stories
have a realistic edge, which makes the reader empathise with the
characters. I will say that I wanted the three siblings to succeed in
their mission and shared in their desperation. I was sharing the
narrator’s curiosity when seeing his cellar bound sister’s nails.
I felt the unease the narrator had about Notpla. Despite the darkness
The Dolls’ is very human in scope.”– The Bobsphere
“Ursula Scavenius
is one of the most exciting Danish short story writers at work today.
The Dolls, in Jennifer Russell's magnificent translation, is a
literary page-turner: haunting, mesmerizing, and unforgettable in all
its grotesque glory.”– Katrine Øgaard Jensen
“A universe in
which everything is painted forth in grey, muted strokes. It is
contagious and all-consuming; even a space car can appear without the
reader raising an eyebrow. A silver thread of ethical and moral
degradation runs through the entire collection, all fig leaves are
burnt, and humankind cannot escape its responsibility of having
destroyed the world. Dramatic, hysterical, and supremely
well-written.”– POV International
“Because of the
Scavenian style and method, these allegorical sets become effectively
and thoroughly, almost claustrophobically, intimidating. The more and
the longer the narrative gets stuck into its dark morass, the more
diabolical the reader experiences their own confinement, and they
become desperate about not being able nor willing to escape, all
because of the very power of fascination.”– Weekendavisen
”Scavenius’s
language draws the reader into a floating, dream-like state, making
the reading experience disturbingly beautiful.”– Litteratursiden
“Skilfully crafted
and shocking stories that are uncompromising in their insistence on
describing without explaining. Or put differently: the stories feel
like testimonies from people who do not themselves understand what is
going on. Scavenius’s dystopian narratives are hard to put down,
recalling both historical crimes and current crises.”–
Information
“The Dolls is
grotesque, a little bit humorous and above all, very well-written.
Scavenius is her very own thing, her prose is carried by sensations
and moods. Although she is not without predecessors, it is truly
spectacular that Scavenius’s books are so unlike other Danish works
being written today.”– Mikkel Krause
Frantzen, Politiken
“When you read
Scavenius you often and suddenly have doubts about whether you can
ever truly share an experience with someone else in that place we
call reality. Scavenius writes like that! Here, the weird and the
ordinary speak the same language. Her beautiful prose, which draws
not only on the traditions of Kafka and Poe, but also on M.R. James,
Henry James, Arthur Machen, Astrid Ehrencron-Kidde and others, is a
quiet but powerful attack on the security we have in life that all
too often keeps us from asking the most relevant questions about
being human.”– Danish Arts Foundation
The epigraph to
Ursula Scavenius’ collection reads: “I’ll tell the story, even
if no one is listening.” It’s also the opening line of her story
‘Notpla’s House’ and a stark establishing of the world she
writes from; contrary, apathetic, disconnected.
It is this
disconnect that propels her fiction, fashioning it as if from the
magnetic repulsions and attractions of the sentences to each other.
It is a poetry of joinings and intersections.
Sometimes the
disconnect occurs across sentences, like this one from the title
story: “Father hums. He has never looked happier. I hand him a
spoon larger than the one in his hand and he starts tapping my metal
shin. It’s rusty. Then Mother and Father stand up and clear the
table.”
Sometimes the
mismatch is within a sentence, asthis from ‘Compartment’ when
Anna, the protagonist, tries to wake her sleeping brothers: “Your
fingers are getting so thin.”
The incongruities
shift her stories away from the convention of escalating event and
climax, using tone instead to create the contractions of an
increasingly claustrophobic world.
And so naturally,
the connections she does make feel almost like clumsy parodies, maybe
it seems, because no one is listening. This from a family eating as
they listen to music: “The violin bows gnaw at the strings the same
way we gnaw at chicken bones.”
It is a weird
simile, like one found growing in a post-literary landscape.
The reader gets the
impression Scavenius’ writing is a repudiation of contemporary
conventional storytelling for, considered next to her pieces, most
other people’s stories feel short-sighted, anaesthetic, a
Disneyfying of the world we live in. Her stories are instead a
response to the violence and repression that serves our privileges, a
literature moulded like a plaster cast to the shape of horror.
Her refusal to write
a ‘normal’ narrative seems initially like a speechlessness, a
cringing from narration itself, doubting its possibility even, as if
her pieces doubt the goodness and heart necessary to form a story.
However, as we learn
more and more how to read her, we see an alternative, subversive mode
of story forming: as each sentence follows another, our understanding
of the world is strengthened or, more often, undermined. Which gives
us the sense that above all other narrative considerations, the
moment is sovereign. It demands more than is fair or equable. It can
override, endanger or even destroy what has come before, although
sometimes–conversely, preciously–it can augment and enrich.
Where a lesser
writer might show us to ourselves with the clanking machinery of
polemic, Scavenius’ greater skill is to make something all too
familiar from such defamiliarization, creating an art from a despotic
language.
Which makes
describing the stories a curious endeavour, for in a Scavenius story
the plot is only what happens; it isn’t fully what the story is
about.
The collection opens
with the title story. Agnes, the narrator lives with her mother and
father and sister. Last year they found children’s bodies at the
bottom of their well, which was when Agnes’ leg first went lame and
her sister elected to live in their cellar below them. Beyond their
house is the Centre from which a shifting music comes.
And then there are
the piles of dolls, a sack of gold teeth, the bus that is only ever
full in one direction, empty the other; the Centre has the marks of a
concentration camp. But people are stupid, father especially. He
builds a wall to keep out the music. We need to defend ourselves, he
says.
The dreamy elision
of ideas create something odd that sticks in the throat, something
slightly surreal, something slightly, alarmingly, real, an
distillation of our world.
At over fifty pages
it is a long short story, its relentlessness a necessary part of its
conjuring of oppression.
The second story is
‘To Russia; Ermelunden Forest, 1888.’ In this, the male narrator
leaves his village, his wife and son, aiming to walk to Russia, where
he feels he might belong. Although, on the way, he finds his old
childhood home, and stays with the spinster there, his sister
grown-up, though she fails to recognise him. He finds out his village
has pronounced him dead and he climbs a tree to watch his funeral,
the experience of which gives him greater determination to go to
Russia.
In this story, more
than a mere solipsism, Scavenius’ exposes the unconnectedness
within our very existence, our failure to relate even to our own
lives.
And despite life and
therefore narrative being more muted than we had hoped, this story
works surprisingly well, its closing section brilliant in the way it
multiplies the story, in a single line re-framing and re-telling the
events anew, ushering us out from within the lone perspective in
which we’d been imprisoned.
‘Notpla’s House’
echoes again the urge to return to a childhood home, though, of
course told by Scavenius, it overshoots, goes beyond where it should.
Notpla is a
father-figure of sorts, his house a refuge against “something
barbaric.” Although, when the narrator comes back, she brings the
threat of the adult world with her. Is she the threat she seeks to
escape? Is Notpla the local murderer?
In its oddity, its
violence, its sly humour, the dreaminess here unfurls a full and
satisfying tale.
The opening of the
final story, ‘Compartment’ comes as a surprise; adapted from her
own play, it is made of slightly different material to the others. In
this, unexpectedly, the narrator ‘sets the scene’, helps us out
with exposition. She is on a train with her two brothers on the way
through Europe to Hungary. Her mother had been with them but has died
on the way, although she is in the compartment with them still, in
the coffin their feet rest on.
Scavenius has
contrived a compelling dramatic scene and so, as opposed to ‘The
Dolls’–which was so fractured it resisted narrative flow–here
the reader feels the tug of a story, which is welcome in a probably
bourgeois kind of way, its ending even striking a hopeful note (“we
alter the story around us,”) despite the narrator’s horrific
interpretation of this.
The book is
brilliantly translated by Jennifer Russell, evoking the stark tone
with great sensitivity, language like a dilute wash of watercolour
exposing the terrifying images and themes underneath–so integral
that, emerging from Scavenius’ world, we recognise the cruelty and
threat and bewilderment as not only the domain of the world she’s
writing from, but also a powerful and poetic compression of where we
live. - Tom Conaghan
https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-2-autumn-2021/ursula-scavenius-emthe-dollsem/
Similar to her debut
Fjer (Feathers) published in 2015, Ursula Scavenius‘ Dolls is a
collection of enthralling and rebellious stories that observe and
depict modern society in an innovative manner. Her stories are
inhabited by people plagued by feelings of powerlessness; in exile,
traumatized, fleeing for their lives. A girl in a wheelchair feeds
her sister in the cellar through a crack in the wall, whilst
Neo-fascism rages outside. Three siblings transport their dead mother
in a coffin through Europe. Not knowing what she is running from, a
woman with amnesia flees for her life. A fire breaks out in a
provincial town and a massacre begins, but no one intervenes. The
figure of a doll operates on several levels in the book.
Scavenius‘ style
has been labelled ’un-Danish‘, ’rebellious’, ’mature’,
’beautiful’ and ’eastern European’ in its refusal to explain
itself; instead, her writing delivers an atmosphere with razorsharp
attention to detail. Her stories are driven by a personal quest to
understand. Best of all, just as you feel beguiled by magic, realism
creeps in.
https://www.kunst.dk/english/literature/books-from-denmark/fiction/ursula-scavenius-dolls
Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The
Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions
of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in
Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to
call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her
characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or
1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you
might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph
of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell,
reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.”
While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book
that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new
set of readers who are ready to listen.
Fittingly, this book
is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does
seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any
stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no
hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here:
everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized
under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in
these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some
doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work.
Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of
Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of
psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of
Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah
Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories
(translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a
global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or
alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own
accord or against their will. A timeless situation.
Each of Scavenius’s
stories drops the reader directly into the tumult, without providing
much backstory or explanation, giving over to the book’s universe.
The reader enters directly into the character’s world, and is able
to leave just as easily, almost floating through the tales and their
various worlds; it’s a bit like The Twilight Zone—the reader
simply must accept the current reality until it switches to a new
one.
The first
story—which shares its title with the collection—reverses the
trope of the woman hidden in the attic. Instead, we’re confronted
with a girl choosing to hide herself in the basement; in some ways,
it recalls the gritty crime shows that proliferate in today’s media
landscape, of girls thrown in a cellar or an attic against their
will. But what is there to do about the daughter who chooses to stay
downstairs, slip notes between the floorboards, and receive a boiled
egg once a day? It’s not too much of a stretch to compare this
situation to our recent quarantines, wherein we are both being
subjected and deciding to stay inside, away from others, receiving
our daily food and having some minimal interaction with others. The
motivation to hide, to shelter in place, can be attributed to
anything: safety, predictability, reliability—the reasons are
cloaked in shadow. “The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting
feeling—what is enough for a life?
Not to mention that
our narrator—the sister of the basement girl—is in a wheelchair
with a newly implanted metal shin, rolling herself from the table to
the window and back, taking the notes from her sister and dropping
her the hard-boiled eggs. Would she join her sister below the floor
if she wasn’t in her chair? Would she leave the house, or is she,
too, happy to stay inside? Is this something more sinister going on
in the house, or is it only in the mind?
The second story,
“To Russia: Ermelunden Forrest 1888,” though stamped with a date,
does not give many particularities of the nineteenth century.
Juxtaposed with the prior narrative of two girls who don’t go very
far, this tale focuses on a man who is running away. He leaves his
wife and daughter behind, ending up at his long-lost sister’s
house. The close proximity of the two stories insinuates
automatically the commentary of men’s mobility and women’s stasis
or abandonment—behind, upstairs, below the floor, at home.
Scavenius capitalizes here on the themes of identity, interpersonal
relationships, new and old homes, new and old selves, and getting
lost and belonging. The man’s sister, who lives still in their
childhood home, doesn’t seem to recognize him, but nevertheless
offers him domestic safety out of the simple kindness of her heart.
She houses him, feeds him, doesn’t let on. Then, she takes off to
Russia, which had originally been his plan all along—leaving him
stuck at the house, and finally revealing that she knew who he was
the whole time. It’s a delicious turn of events. The note she
leaves for him says “I’ve gone on ahead.” This word choice
seems important—being one step in front, taking advantage when
opportunity strikes.
The last two stories
also capitalize on the themes of safety and home. Characters seek
refuge, whether in the form of a physical roof over their heads for
the night, or the more symbolic and heavyweight return to a country
from which their ancestors were once exiled, to bury a dead mother
who may or may not be a hero. In “Compartment,” the children
question heavily where their mother’s coffin belongs, all within
the physical confines of a train compartment, while at the same time
speeding along across country lines.
Some of the best
writing in the book appears in the form of descriptions that work to
build setting and character rather than move along some of the absurd
plotlines. Lines such as “His eyelashes flutter like the tails of
cows swatting flies in the summer heat” give us a taste of the
Scandinavian pastoral landscape where these stories supposedly take
place. “There’s an artichoke leaf stuck in my throat and I am
trying not to listen” is such a specific and detailed thought,
spelled out before us so as to not be ignored. Rarely do we get
insight into what others are trying not to think about or do. These
details slow down the otherwise sparse prose, calling attention to
themselves. And much of the writing is quite visceral, like nails on
a chalkboard:
It’s as if
those violins are inside my head, says Father and passes Mother the
saltshaker. Mother sprinkles salt on her food and stares out the
window. The sound of violins from the forest grows louder. When
chicken bones scrape against your teeth, it screeches in your ears.
The violin bows gnaw at the strings the same way we gnaw at chicken
bones. Violins, we keep calling them, but really it sounds like
something else. Like chicken bones scraping against teeth.
Scavenius’s book
is filled with impressive observation and uncomfortable characters,
all bound together by her peculiar and gritty prose, beautifully told
in Russell’s immaculate translation. - Sabrina Parker
Greene
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/11/10/something-is-rotten-but-what-onthe-dolls-by-ursula-scavenius/
URSULA SCAVENIUS is a writer based in Copenhagen. She is a graduate
of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and holds an MA in
comparative literature and Italian from the University of Copenhagen.
She debuted in 2015 with the short story collection Fjer [Feathers],
which won the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize and was
nominated for the Montana Prize for Fiction. Her second book, The
Dolls, was published in January 2020 and was shortlisted for the
Edvard P. Prize that same year, as was Feathers in 2015.
