Author(s): Ursula Scavenius ; Jennifer Russell

Short Stories | Read our reviews! | Translated fiction | Denmark | Lolli Editions

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

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“The disasters that befall you are always different from the ones you imagine,” states a character in one of the stories in Ursula Scavenius’s riveting and unsettling collection The Dolls, a collection suffused with unidentifiable or unquantifiable threats, threats that leave the narrators transfixed by the mundane details of lives distorted by unbearable forces that they cannot comprehend or name. It is hard to make a case that 'real life', so to call it, operates any differently. Is it the case that the unbearable arises from the mundane, that the unbearable is inherent in the mundane but suppressed to make the mundane bearable, or, rather, is it that by suppressing the unbearable we are left with the mundane, the only evidence we have, perhaps, of the forces set against us? Is the mundane therefore the surest point of access to the unbearable? Is the most unbearable closest to the most mundane? The potentising restraint of Scavenius’s prose, the withholding of all but the most resonant details, gives great power to that which is excluded, to that which it is impossible to include. Just as the universe is, supposedly, comprised mostly of dark matter, which we cannot sense and for which the only evidence is the effect it has upon that portion of the universe that we can sense, so too literature is most effective when attending to the effects upon the mundane of forces that cannot otherwise be directly or adequately addressed. The total, comprised primarily of dark matter, cannot be expressed. Any idea of 'the total' comes at the expense of the parts, by the suppression of some parts and the magnification of other parts. Any idea of 'the total' is a distortion of that which it purports to represent. A ‘story’, a ‘development’, likewise, is a totalitarian concept. Naturalism is a totalitarian concept. Scavenius has Kafka’s gift of being able to allow her details to resonate in the spaces that surround them, echoing in spaces that cannot otherwise be delineated, intimating the complex forces seething beneath her deceptively simple prose. Her characters move about in worlds strangely sloped, the familiar becoming unfamiliar and revealed as evidence of the unbearable. Time slips, the past is seen to be a threat, even an idyllic past is a threat because it contains the circumstances out of which the problematic present arose. “Birds chirp in the bushes outside. I laugh, realising it’s only a memory.” Every detail, every occurrence is a point of pressure, a point at which the mundane is assailed by dark matter. In the title story, ‘The Dolls’, the arrival of some refugees reveals the fascistic potential latent in the local community, including in the narrator’s father, and the distorting effect of that force upon thought and language: “There is no way to prove whether the scream was real, someone on the radio says. … It sounds real, but these days anything could be propaganda.” The force of the unbearable is always felt first upon language. 

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.

JENNIFER RUSSELL has published translations of Amalie Smith, Christel Wiinblad, and Peter-Clement Woetmann. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius’s ‘Birdland’, and in 2020 she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild's All the Birds in the Sky.