Selected excerpts from reviews in the English Press
“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
Listen at 23.30: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00100cr?fbclid=IwAR1Rm5_oQqFV-DN8b2e7Bpf9m1YEjElxJxEhd9rtIhDq5ObNCcbRpeFW4xI
“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
“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
“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
“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
Among great Goodreads …"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."
Chiara Liberio rated it ***** it was amazing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56605286-the-dolls
“…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.
Matt T rated it ***** it was amazing
Description from Lolli editions:
The dolls consists of 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.
Neil Griffiths talks about the book. He is one of the forces behind the new Weatherglass Books and maker of Republic of Conscious! And he says among other: “Here is a writer of extremely unusual imaginative powers. I found myself completely entranced.” Listen at 23.30! https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00100cr
The Dolls
by Ursula Scaveniuspublished on Lolli editions
Lolli editions. Rights: Copenhagen literary agency
Translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell
Design Laura Silke
Thanks for support from he Danish Art Foundation
Exacting Clam writes also: "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... 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."
“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.”