“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, BBC Radio 4”
Press in English for English Publishing 2021
The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius
Translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell
Shortlisted for the Edvard P. Prize 2020
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.
Publication 21 October 2021
Praise for The Dolls
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
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
Scavenius’s book is filled with impressive observation and uncomfortable characters, all bound together by her peculiarnand gritty prose, beautifully told in Russell’s immaculate translation
– Asymptote
A dilute wash of watercolour exposes the terrifying images and themes underneath… 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
– Exacting Clam
“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.”
– Christine Lind Ditlevsen, 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.”
– Lars Bukdahl, Weekendavisen
Scavenius’s language draws the reader into a floating, dream-like state, making the reading experience disturbingly beautiful.
– Emma Karlebjerg, Litteratursiden
“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
“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.”
– Kristin Vego, 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
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.