I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.

The Dolls, translated by Jennifer Russell from the 2020 Danish-language original Dukkerne by Ursula Scavenius is the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book Club, and also the latest from the exciting small small independent press Lolli Editions, shortlisted for the International Booker in 2021 for The Employees. They specialise (although not exclusively) in translations from the Danish and their mission in their own words:

We publish contemporary fiction that challenges existing ideas and breathes new life into the novel form. Our aim is to introduce to English-language readers some of the most innovative writers that speak to our shared culture in new and compelling ways, from Europe and beyond.

The brilliant title story is narrated by a young woman Agnes and begins:

I sit at the table listening to the violin music that has started playing in the forest. I don't budge. Our house is just ten metres from the Centre. Here we are again, sitting around the table, nodding. Mother, Father and me. we do every evening. In our town something is often on fire; a car, a house, a bin.

We always agree. We agree that mince doesn't taste good, but that salt pork does. It's practically impossible to sleep at night with that violin music, says Father, and I repeat what he says. My sister Ella, who sits in the cellar, sings so loudly we can hear her through the floor. Then she starts to dance, and Mother lifts the trapdoor. Come upstairs now, its dinnertime, she yells, but Ella only replies: No.

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 something else. chicken bones scraping against teeth.

This is a disturbing, offbeat, unsettling piece, closer to a novella than a short-story, both surreal and yet strangely resonant.

Agnes and her family live close to the Centre, a place for refugees, served by buses that arrive empty and leave full. Agnes herself is now wheelchair bound, with metal shins which her Father often taps with a spoon, her Mother chastising him with the same spoon. Her sister Ella has retreated to the cellar (the room of lies, as we used to call it) which she refuses to leave, after an incident when Ella and Agnes discovered the bodies of some children from the centre in a well, the bodies, so Ella claims, shorn of hair and with their teeth removed.

The air is full of grey flakes of snow which Ella tells Agnes come from children’s burnt hair and fingernails, as well as plagues of flies, and invasive noctuids. The violins - or whatever they are - are a form of public nuisance, associated by the community with undesirable elements, which Father and his neighbour blame on the refugees from the Centre, and plan their revenge.

The eponymous dolls relate to Father's business idea. He obtains supplies of dolls, real hair (he claims it comes from India) and has the family dye it blond then sew it in to the dolls heads: At the Machine they only manufacture fake hair, he said, but this hair is real, it comes from India.  If we dye it blonde, all the newly arrived refugee children will queue up to buy the dolls so they can be the children whose families have always lived here.

And the Machine is a form of factory, which dominates the local economy, both manufacturing goods, but also processing humans (I think about it all the time: Ella and I were told the put the children on a conveyor belt in the Machine, back when it was just a small stationary factory). But now the Machine has expanded and turned mobile - and it is threatening to literally consume Agnes and her family.

The other three pieces are shorter - c.20 pages rather than 50 - and in a similar vein, although none quite hit the heights of the opener for me, and perhaps I would have preferred them expanded to novella length.

“To Russia, Ermelunden Forest, 1888” is narrated by Niels, an engineer, whose defining project, a tunnel to be used for defensively flooding land under the country is invaded, collapses.  

People had once called my work as an engineer fantastic: Niels Madsen's dedication is fantastic! But it wasn't. My work was nothing but fanaticism in its purest form. My attempt to avoid this unease and tedium had been doomed from the start. I should never have taken on the job in Ermelunden. I should have left 20 years ago, I told myself. After my mother died, when my father transformed in a single night. The night he turned evil.

He flees in shame, leaving his wife and child behind.  Planning to go into exile in Russia, he instead gets no further than his family home, occupied by someone who may be his sister, yet neither acknowledges the other, and instead Niels obsessed over his failure in an almost Bernhardian fashion:

And so I lay in bed ruminating in this manner. There was lightning, and it started to rain. I couldn't fight the feeling of a band of steel around my skull. The public humiliation of the tunnel collapsing was still ripping my thoughts to shreds. I hoped to wake up in Russia and find myself the person I was as a child, before my home turned evil because of what my father did.  After my humiliation, I never wanted to see Ermelunden again. 

“Notpla” is perhaps closest in style to "The Dolls". It has the narrator seeking shelter at the house of someone called Notpla, who greets her as finally returning after 40 years, although the narrator later comments that she isn’t even that old. And meanwhile some sort of unspecified catastrophe is occurring outside, from which the narrator fled, except he cannot remember what, and it is equally unclear if Notpla offers sanctuary, or is part of the threat:

The flies buzz about. They've multiplied. Dead flies on the floor and lazy flies in the ceiling. It's quieted down. There's a looming sense of catastrophe. What might have happened here before my return? I wonder. Once in a while Notpla will mention arson. Massacres in the forest. People on the run. There are fish on my plate. Who fried them? The flies nibble at them. Their legs move across the fish sandwiches.

"Compartment" (which can be found at Granta: https://granta.com/compartment/) begins:

It’s been three days since our mother died. Her name was Nasfa, and that’s all we’ve ever called her. There are three of us, in a compartment on a train making its way through Germany, to Hungary. On the floor between our seats is the narrow coffin in which Nasfa lies.

The narrator is travelling with her brothers and her mother to Hungary, from where the family was exiled after the Russian invasion.  En route, the mother, Nasfa, died and the remaining three are now taking the coffin to Hungary.   As with all the stories there is a sense of dread as to what is happening in the wider world.  But the narrator and her brother’s also bicker as to whether Nasfa (who denounces fascism, Nazism, Communism and capitalism) was a heroine, opposing the various forces that invaded the country, or ashamed of her lack of resistance.  

Childhood rushes by a breeze: I see the thickets, the beech trees in the garden, and I recall the scent of apples, rosehip and dandelions. We were almost always outside playing in the tall grass, and when we came back inside the house, Nasfa would be staring out into the dusk and say: We Hungarians are always deported, our souls are always raped.

We did not understand the stories of her childhood in exile.

Our garden consisted of goutweed and dandelions, rosehip and old fruit trees, and it was full of weeds, which Nasfa insisted we let be. She said: We Hungarians are always purged, persecuted, denied our rights. Yanked up by the roots.

Now she’s in the coffin.

Highly worthwhile, the title story a 5 star read although a strong 4 for the collection overall.

Reviews:
https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/n...
https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatin...
https://lunate.co.uk//the-doll...2021 sub-roc-bookclub-2021-1223 s Neil1,007 703

I received this book as part of my subscription to The Republic of Consciousness book club. Every month, a new book drops through my letterbox and, because I don’t tend to look at the lists of what is coming up, what will arrive is nearly always a mystery. Sometimes, and The Dolls is a case in point, what arrived remains a mystery after I have read it!

The Dolls comes to us from the Danish original via a translation by Jennifer Russell and publication by Lolli Editions who concentrate on publishing (not entirely exclusively) translations from Danish.

This is a collection of 4 short stories. To one degree or another, all four stories pull the rug from under the reader’s feet. The stories don’t provide us with background information, but simply drop us into a world that is a bit our own but which has somehow slipped sideways to become an unsettling and different place. And a large part of the unsettling nature of the stories comes from the narrative style which includes lots of paragraphs this:

Two or three violins are screeching in the forest somewhere. I’m still sitting by the window. I fold a white piece of paper and write down the names of all the languages I don’t speak. I put an X next to the ones I want to learn, and an X next to the one I am afraid of and next to the one that others are afraid of. What I want most of all is to go to the beach and dangle my legs from the pier I did a few years ago, back when I could cycle there.

The first and third stories are very surreal whilst the other two have more of a grounding in the world we know. But even those latter two are filled with the strange observations, happenings and non-sequiturs that fill the book.

I have to say that I found the whole thing a delight to read. The stories themselves are quite dark. In the first our narrator, Agnes, lives with her family near the Centre. She is in a wheelchair and has metal shins which her father sometimes hits with a spoon (go figure). Her sister, Ella, has decided to live in the cellar and is fed via a pipe. There is a Machine that expands to fill the community, there are grey flakes in the air which might or might not originate from burnt hair and fingernails. And violins play in the surrounding forest. Or something does and it might sound a bit violins.

You can never be sure of your footing as you read and I think this is what I enjoyed most about the book. It’s a book I would very much to read again and I think at that point I might well add another star to my rating.202112 s Tilly124 20

"I'll tell the story, even if no one is listening: A shadow trailed after me the other day. It appeared in glimpses, one moment to my right, the next to my left. I kept on nervously turning around to look for it as I walked. Suddenly, it was gone. It must have been someone who lost their way, I thought..."

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell) is a nightmarish collection of four short stories. Set amid a world that feels both hauntingly familiar and yet dystopian, each story has its own shadow of disquiet.

A girl abandons her family, descending into the ultimate isolation in the basement below their very feet, willing time to not let her age, the sun to not let her grow, nor a hidden plague sweep over her. A brother abandons his sister, only to return to her ness years later, shrouded by forestry and uncertainty. Another girl is overcome by memory loss, leading a hazy existence where the line between friend and enemy is blurred. The final story follows a train journey not dissimilar to Orpheus's expedition to save Eurydice from the Underworld; three siblings travel to Hungary with their mother's coffin, seeking to bury her among her own people while questioning what little they know about their own mother.

There is a hallucinogenic quality to each of the stories. The prose is sparse, fragmentary, dream, tactile. I was seduced by the openings of all four stories, and left with a heavy sense of dread by the end. This is a collection I can feel myself returning to again and again, finding new symbolism beneath the unsettling backdrop.

*ad-pr note: I received an ARC from the publisher (Lolli Editions), but all thoughts are my own.10 s Alan Teder2,259 151

Surreal Bleak Worlds
Review of the Lolli Editions paperback (October 2021) translated by Jennifer Russell* from the Danish language original Dukkerne (January 2020)

This book might be a bit of a tough nut, unless you are in a certain frame of mind to tackle these bleak and apocalyptic stories which seem candidates for future screenplays for film director Béla Tarr. That is if he hadn't retired from directing and László Krasznahorkai didn't already have the job (e.g. Satantango, A torinói ló, etc.).

The title story The Dolls is particularly effective in this regard. A family with two daughters is living near a forest where the sound of violins torments them and a slowly encroaching 'Machine' is gradually expanding its size and boundaries to envelope all before it. One of the daughters escapes to the cellar where communication and food from the family is passed through a pipe in the floor. It is something out of Beckett's Endgame, but multiplied tenfold and with not much Beckettian humour to provide some comedy. The following three stories are almost light relief after that opener.

Author Ursula Scavenius (great name!) seems to have only two books published to date, but has already made quite a name for herself. The translation by Jennifer Russell is excellent. I wouldn't have minded an introductory or afterword essay, but it seems so few English translations provide that these days. I have to hope for a future Estonian translation from Loomingu Raamatukogu for that.

I read The Dolls as the November 2021 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.

Trivia and Links
* I'm linking to Lolli Editions translators page for the Jennifer Russell biography, as the Goodreads link combines at least one other author credits with those of the translator.

You can read one of the book's four short stories, Compartment, at the online edition of Granta October 2021.

Perhaps it is only me, but the amorphous shape on the cover looks a screaming skull doesn't it? Rather appropriate, even if it is only a chance coincidence.2021-reading-challenge 2021-roc-patreon-subscription absurdist-dada-surrealist ...more7 s Chiara LiberioAuthor 1 book11

A collection of four stories that resemble sweaty, surrealist nightmares where the familiar turns menacing, a friend becoming an enemy or a brother reverting to a baby. Frightening fairy tales (as fairy tales should be) from the dark heart of Europe, also featuring familiar elements that are also eerie and strange: little wooden houses surrounded by whispering woods and ominous belltowers and cemeteries; enigmatic, elusive mother figures and siblings estranged from their parents (due to death, evil, madness) inhabiting claustrophobic spaces, be it house, cellar, or train wagon, or escaping through forests, plague and flooded territories.

The Dolls opens with the sound of violins and the awareness of something burning outside: “The violin bows gnaw at the strings the same way we gnaw at chicken bones” (here I am reminded of Hansel and Gretel). After finding dead children in a well, a girl refuses to grow up and hides in cellar and is fed via a tube by her sister on wheelchair. They live near a Centre and play with dolls with real hair that they dye blonde. Ashes fall onto the ground and strident violin notes give no respite. No wall can keep out the invaders nor the monstrous Machine that grows bigger and bigger. Do not think you know where it’s going because it’s much worse. This was absolutely terrifying.

To Russia: As the tunnel (part of a government plan to stop an invasion by flooding land) he has built collapses, an engineer runs though the forest back to his childhood home where he will find his estranged older sister. A haunting exploration of foreignness and estrangement, the desire to find a mythical place where to belong “behind the face of the gruesome empire”.

Notpla’s House: again brother and older sister on the run, as if the protagonists from the previous story had broken into a new one. When she arrives at Notpla’s house after crossing the woods, sister is amnesiac and traumatised: is the man she encounters a friend or the enemy she is running away from? And who is the mysterious woman accused of bringing pestilence? A haunting tale on trauma and the evil that lurks inside.

Compartment has a clearer historical context and exposes the ferocious acts of prevarication, deportation and displacement that have characterised Mitteleuropean history and so-called liberation movements. As three siblings on a train accompany their dead mother in a coffin back to her native Hungary travelling through a flooded Europe, they question how her being a refugee and her relationship to her oppressors has shaped her life. While the previous tales toy with the idea of return and rebirth, Compartment takes a bleak, different turn.

four movements in a symphony, Scavenius’ stories chart a perfect itinerary where Europe’s past, present and future seem to collide as past traumas resurface and the phantoms of displacement, occupation, persecution, violence and hatred revive in new forms. Her unique style reminds me of the best Expressionist masters, with their strident dissonant, lacerate tunes, the poignant, condensed imagery and the outcry of angst. Her universe unfolds in ominous apocalyptic scenarios that are so terrifying because they are the stuff of our times, along with disease, flooding, fires, scapegoats and false prophets.

There is no soothing ending here: under the “congealed-looking” façade of an exhausted civilisation lurks pure ferocity. These stories are as unsettling, fearless and uncompromising as the great literature of our times should be. The Dolls is absolutely astonishing and Ursula Scavenius a modern master.

I am grateful to Lolli Editions for an advance review copy of The Dolls.4 s Robert2,162 231

Ursula Scavenius’ The Dolls consists of four short stories. At first glance they may seem unconnected but they are all bound together by various themes, namely brother/sister relations. generally when I review a short story collection I only mention a handful of the short pieces but since there are only four here, I can focus on each one – in a spoiler free way of course.

The title story is about a family who have to glue and dye hair so that the put them on dolls. One day the daughter of the family decides to imprison herself in the cellar. The rest of the story consists of the narrator watching her develop in her enclosed quarters.

To Russia is a more political story, consisting of a government plan going wrong and one of the workers escaping the mess in order to visit his sister. Out of the four stories I found this one to be the most introspective as sibling relationships are described in great detail.

Notpla’s House is the more creepy of the four. A brother and sister are on the run and the sister develops amnesia and starts to bond with a stranger Notpla. The problem lies in the fact that as we readers are not sure if Notpla’s intentions are good or not as he seems to have a dual character what makes things creepier is the appearance of a mysterious old woman.

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. This story is the more historical one as it is set against the backdrop of the Russian liberation, which displays the violent acts that were present. Also during this period Russia was experiencing flooding, which proves to be a challenge as well.

Aside from sibling relations these stories are bound together by diseases, historical events and acts of nature. Yet there is something unsettling, dark and foggy. If one takes a look at the book’s cover one can get a feel of the tone of stories. Saying that un horror fiction, there’s no twist here. 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.

As a person who is a bit wary of short stories due to inconsistent quality, I can recommend The Dolls fully. As an aside the publisher, Lolli has been releasing a lot of great books over the past few years so I know I can trust anything that has their mark on it and The Dolls is no exception.6 s Matt T101 24

Hard to follow for a non-Native Danish speaker, and yet I suspect this is the case if you're native Danish too, for, despite the clear sense of literary contrivance behind each of the four stories, there's this strange mode of oblique dramatic inquiry into our default Western negative theological worldview, which reminds me of Kafka, Schulz, Kundera... In 'The Dolls, Ursula Scavenius excavates a Mitteleuropa literary sculpture park and casts the greats in a new light with a new shadow.3 s Mariano RG42 4

“Os voy a contar una historia, incluso si nadie me escucha: el otro día una sombra me estaba siguiendo. Aparecía y desaparecía, en un momento estaba a mi izquierda y al otro estaba a mi derecha. Mientras caminaba me giraba nerviosamente para ver si seguía ahí. De repente, desapareció. Debe haber sido alguien que perdió su camino…”

The Dolls son cuatro historias que más bien parecen cuatro pesadillas en la que la constante es que ocurren en un mundo muy similar al nuestro pero son distopías. Las cuatro historias te atrapan desde el principio y las cuatro terminan dándote un sentimiento de inquietud y desesperación. En la primera, una niña se aleja del mundo encerrándose en el sótano de la casa para que ni el tiempo ni la luz le afecten.

Las cuatro historias parecen como un sueño, como si fuesen alucinaciones, de hecho parece que estuviéramos en mitad de una película de David Lynch. La prosa es escasa pero inquietante, lo que ayuda a que el mensaje de cada historia nos llegue y nos ponga los pelos de punta.

Cuando lo terminé, tuve la sensación de querer volver a leerlo, y ahora que estamos próximos a Hallowe’en, es la época perfecta. Un acierto este libro, muy recomendado.

I must thank @lollieditions for having sent me an ARC to be reviewed and these are my own words based on my own experience reading it.2 s Eva248

Ursula Scavenius - Dukkerne (The Dolls)
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This book comprises of 4 short stories with the first story, titled The Dolls, gives name to the book. There is something creepy about the way the stories are written, you are not very sure about what is actually going on and you keep second guessing yourself if the stories were about something else entirely different ala “The Others” with Nicole Kidman. The first story is about a family : dad, mom, Agnes who is sitting on a wheelchair, and Ella (Agnes’ older sister) who insists to live in the basement. They live close to asylum centre somewhere in small town Denmark. They also have an alcoholic neighbour Kurt who are also hating about all those “foreigners” and the violin tunes that comes at night from the forest. The last story titled “Coupé” is about Anna’s train ride through Europe with her brother Jakub and Miska to visit their mum’s Hungarian family. However their mum, Nasfa, died of sickness in the middle of the trip, so they had her in a coffin between the train seats
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