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
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.
