Camilla Grudova’s The Coiled Serpent, an anthology of short stories, can be roughly divided into two sections. About half the stories tend more towards painting a nightmarish vision of the British world, depictions which at times can become so strange and even apocalyptic as to be described as “British Hell.” The first story of Coiled Serpent, “Through Ceilings and Walls,” introduces us to this palette with a microcosm of rural Britain. Echoing Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” a foreign traveler visits an island nation and witnesses a hard-to-swallow culture. Grudova’s island is a menacing parody of Britain, haunted by old portraits and trinkets depicting the royal family, tasteless and rotten food, decomposing buildings, and a lurking green slime that shows increasing signs of organic life. Another story, “Description and History of a British Swimming Pool / Banya Banya!,” chronicles the world’s worst bath house, or at least the most lunatic. Cultures are collected in room after room of pools, Turkish baths, Russian saunas, an English River complete with frogs and lily pads, salt water pools, ice pools and more, menacingly mish-mashed like a colonizer’s fever dream. Children are trapped in inflatable castles, a man lives in a steam room waiting to toss boiling water onto unsuspecting bathers, and one pool, forever covered with tarp, emanates ghastly moans.
The second half of the stories move to more generalized spaces, less obviously tied to the culturally English world. The eponymous narrative, “The Coiled Serpent,” looks at modern self-improvement philosophy among other trends. The story focuses on three roommates who swear off all sex and emission in general in the goal of reaching a state of superconsciousness. “White Asparagus” enters a fairy-tale apartment space with a living ancestral plaque that eats jam, windows are covered with wallpaper, and mushrooms grow from the floor. “Hoo Hoo” depicts a post-apocalyptic state where monstrous owl-human hybrids haunt the skies, and surviving humans are obsessed with stockpiling a “museum.”
The book is wretchedly hilarious throughout—wretched in the echoes of tragedy and even horror that lurk about its pages. In “A Novel (or Poem) About Fan, Aged 11 Years or The Zoo,” an impoverished family provides themselves as physical material to upper-class artists, in the process treated as and even taking on the properties of inhuman objects. “After the fourth child, [Jenny] had started to name her children after objects she wanted but could not afford: Piano, Stove, Grand Fern. The children grew to resemble the objects they stood in for. Piano was a girl with a wide mouth and large, orderly teeth […] Grand Fern was thin and sickly green. Most cruelly, Jenny named a little boy Dog after she was unable to decide what kind of dog she wished for.”
In an interview, Grudova describes a love of “inventories and indexes,” a fascination that seeps through all the narratives. She holds a degree in Art History and German, and one imagines the studies in art contribute to the vast collection of bizarre and grotesque objects that staff the stories. The studies in German may provide a link to the tradition of the Grimm Brothers collection of folk tales: antic worlds of impoverished children, confusing situations, and the work of muddling fairies— whether they are hidden outside the edges of the narrative, or plainly within. The narrator of the story “White Asparagus” finds one such gnome, “a tiny old man sitting in a tiny striped armchair,” living secretly inside an apartment cupboard.
The stories are told in third-person and first-person voice. The third-person narratives, as generally expected, take a more outside, neutral view of events, and are often more sensually overwhelming—a phrase which here means baffling and disturbing to the senses to contemplate. These tales maximize the aesthetic shock of Grudova’s rapidly decaying Victorian carnival worlds. The first-person works are slightly (slightly in centimeters) more grounded, helping give us the emotional interiors of characters we can empathize with amongst the madness. The stories “Mr Elephant” and “White Asparagus” are exceptions, giving us narrative personas so strange and nearly inscrutable (particularly in “Mr Elephant”), that the text moves towards a more Joycean expression.
Much more can be said of The Coiled Serpent. Readers may resonate with a sense that the worlds depicted are ones gone off the rails with a devouring, in some cases literally devouring, capitalism. Societies obsessed with class can also be found aplenty in the narratives, though that obsession is a symptom far more ancient than Adam Smith’s revelatory descriptions. Overall, this reader feels a deeper trend, one echoing the irresolvable mazes of Kafka and the cryptic natural world of fairy tales. Society itself no longer exists in the concluding story “Hoo Hoo,” but that doesn’t remove the massive accumulations of debris and rumblings of neuroticism that remain in the world.
We humans are collectors. We collect the animate and inanimate until the mysteries of nature soak through and become, when we’ve forgotten we live in a compiled world, our natural shells.
FICTION
