Don’t read this in a sauna
Camilla Grudova, The Coiled Serpent
Atlantic Books, 208pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781838956387
reviewed by Denise Rose Hansen
To read The Coiled Serpent is to live out an indignant maid’s wildest revenge fantasy without getting sticky fingers. A can of horse glue, one of Grudova’s recurring objects, might feature alongside tiny scissors and a voodoo doll on the worktop of someone harbouring particularly bitter feelings towards an alpha ex-boyfriend. In such a case, reading this tantalising collection of stories is a much neater coping strategy.
The collection ranges widely. There’s the gothic tale, ‘Ivor’, of boarding schoolboys who fall in love with the eponymous apparition who, both enigmatic and dust-shedding, has ’a pallor so powdery some of us thought he wore make-up’. Ivor is possibly deployed by school management to keep the boys in the crumbling corridors, the nostalgic memory of more prosperous times. In the title story, we meet a group of flat-sharing tech bros who are devoting themselves to semen retention. That’s where Grudova borrows her title – from C.G. Van Vliet’s The Coiled Serpent: A Philosophy of Conservation and Transmutation of Reproductive Energy, an antiquarian self-help book that guides men’s personal and spiritual development through abstaining from ejaculation. But that doesn’t mean that self-petting needs to be boring:
Angelo is also fond of melting together chocolate bars, chilli sauce and cheese, and rolling the stuff into a candle-like roll of ‘power food’, which he washes down sipping tea through his teeth from his enviable collection of flavours: ‘aluminium, flowers, perfume, dog shit, beef’.
Despite its often violent subjects — be it an exploding tech bro or custard factory, or all the unspeakable things people are made to do to survive under unrelenting capitalism, like being a surrogate on an arcane, dictated diet or intimately servicing spa guests –—Grudova’s prose is finely balanced. It leaps off the page with an immediacy that feels unprocessed, not unlike the work of a painter resisting the urge to muck around after a series of peart strokes has been carried out.
And yet the image that springs to mind when I think of the entirety of Grudova’s collection is an assembly of evil babies in black cribs being fussed over by a staff of white-apron-clad godmothers in a room stuck full with stale Victorian bath products and an obscene assortment of food items only rivalled by Martha Stewart’s Twitter feed (my personal favourites are her pus-covered raw meat arrangements and fat-glistening metal bowls filled to the brim with a white mass sprinkled with brown and grey crumbs — apparently a truffle risotto).
Grudova’s indexing of eclectic paraphernalia extends to her characters. In ‘A Novel (or Poem) About Fan, Aged 11 Years or The Zoo’, the children are named after goods their mother covets but can’t afford: Piano, Stove, and Grand Fern. Gradually, the children come to resemble the fantasies they stand in for: ‘Grand Fern was thin and sickly green.’ As in most of the stories, there is static between what is real and what is imagined — because what exactly is the difference? As Grudova herself has noted during an event, everything that happens in her stories, no matter how far-fetched it might seem, is no stranger than things she witnesses in life all the time.
It’s hard to imagine a critique of the nostalgic post-imperialism of British institutions that could be more entertaining or elegantly crafted than The Coiled Serpent. Who would have thought that the perils of not letting oneself ejaculate could become shorthand for class-based suppression? One man’s delusional self-restraint is another’s impending disaster (and nasty mess to clean up). Most of the stories balance an idea of moderation – often specifically English –— and its violent expression when the repressed reality erupts, just as most of Grudova’s rooms seem to conceal something that is rotting away behind a polished cabinet door. The reveal might happen on polished ballroom floors for public display — like when Ivor comes tumbling down the stairs and conspicuously survives the fall — or more privately, domestically, as in the shape of the brown bubbling liquid that every night floods the writerly Ukrainian tenant’s tiled basement flat in ‘Surrogates’.
Struggling artists and academics are everywhere. In ‘The Poison Garden’, a Courtauld graduate without the ‘right’ network stalks the guy of a beautiful couple that have recently moved to Margate. While posing as a poet, strolling around town with a London Review of Books tote bag over arm, he is also a Harvard graduate on sabbatical from his City job. The parading of objects both attractive and abject reminds the reader that the urge to buy things as a means to distract from, control, or momentarily improve our lives is driven by an underlying sense of powerless uncertainty and inferiority. In Grudova’s scatological anthropology, the need to take on bullshit jobs in the face of precarisation is thrown into sharp relief through the presence of a lot of actual shit — like the one a rugby player leaves on the sauna floor as a gift to the service staff.
For all that is repelling in these stories, their irresistible appeal is how they nudge against the unbounded, serendipitous experiences you open yourself up to when allowing yourself to be curious in the meeting with other people. The only proviso I would give is not to read The Coiled Serpent in the community spa. I will never be able to sit on the bench of the Oasis Sports Centre sauna again without thinking of Nell in ‘Avalon’: ‘I have a fear of getting pregnant from all the drops of sperm here.’
The collection ranges widely. There’s the gothic tale, ‘Ivor’, of boarding schoolboys who fall in love with the eponymous apparition who, both enigmatic and dust-shedding, has ’a pallor so powdery some of us thought he wore make-up’. Ivor is possibly deployed by school management to keep the boys in the crumbling corridors, the nostalgic memory of more prosperous times. In the title story, we meet a group of flat-sharing tech bros who are devoting themselves to semen retention. That’s where Grudova borrows her title – from C.G. Van Vliet’s The Coiled Serpent: A Philosophy of Conservation and Transmutation of Reproductive Energy, an antiquarian self-help book that guides men’s personal and spiritual development through abstaining from ejaculation. But that doesn’t mean that self-petting needs to be boring:
When no one else was home, Angelo took the jar into the bathroom, along with a small box of toothpicks. He took the herring piece out and stuck it together, in a loop, with one of the toothpicks to a perfect size for his penis and masturbated by moving it up and down the tip. After he came, he threw the toothpick out and put the herring back into the jar, back in the fridge.
Angelo is also fond of melting together chocolate bars, chilli sauce and cheese, and rolling the stuff into a candle-like roll of ‘power food’, which he washes down sipping tea through his teeth from his enviable collection of flavours: ‘aluminium, flowers, perfume, dog shit, beef’.
Despite its often violent subjects — be it an exploding tech bro or custard factory, or all the unspeakable things people are made to do to survive under unrelenting capitalism, like being a surrogate on an arcane, dictated diet or intimately servicing spa guests –—Grudova’s prose is finely balanced. It leaps off the page with an immediacy that feels unprocessed, not unlike the work of a painter resisting the urge to muck around after a series of peart strokes has been carried out.
And yet the image that springs to mind when I think of the entirety of Grudova’s collection is an assembly of evil babies in black cribs being fussed over by a staff of white-apron-clad godmothers in a room stuck full with stale Victorian bath products and an obscene assortment of food items only rivalled by Martha Stewart’s Twitter feed (my personal favourites are her pus-covered raw meat arrangements and fat-glistening metal bowls filled to the brim with a white mass sprinkled with brown and grey crumbs — apparently a truffle risotto).
Grudova’s indexing of eclectic paraphernalia extends to her characters. In ‘A Novel (or Poem) About Fan, Aged 11 Years or The Zoo’, the children are named after goods their mother covets but can’t afford: Piano, Stove, and Grand Fern. Gradually, the children come to resemble the fantasies they stand in for: ‘Grand Fern was thin and sickly green.’ As in most of the stories, there is static between what is real and what is imagined — because what exactly is the difference? As Grudova herself has noted during an event, everything that happens in her stories, no matter how far-fetched it might seem, is no stranger than things she witnesses in life all the time.
It’s hard to imagine a critique of the nostalgic post-imperialism of British institutions that could be more entertaining or elegantly crafted than The Coiled Serpent. Who would have thought that the perils of not letting oneself ejaculate could become shorthand for class-based suppression? One man’s delusional self-restraint is another’s impending disaster (and nasty mess to clean up). Most of the stories balance an idea of moderation – often specifically English –— and its violent expression when the repressed reality erupts, just as most of Grudova’s rooms seem to conceal something that is rotting away behind a polished cabinet door. The reveal might happen on polished ballroom floors for public display — like when Ivor comes tumbling down the stairs and conspicuously survives the fall — or more privately, domestically, as in the shape of the brown bubbling liquid that every night floods the writerly Ukrainian tenant’s tiled basement flat in ‘Surrogates’.
Struggling artists and academics are everywhere. In ‘The Poison Garden’, a Courtauld graduate without the ‘right’ network stalks the guy of a beautiful couple that have recently moved to Margate. While posing as a poet, strolling around town with a London Review of Books tote bag over arm, he is also a Harvard graduate on sabbatical from his City job. The parading of objects both attractive and abject reminds the reader that the urge to buy things as a means to distract from, control, or momentarily improve our lives is driven by an underlying sense of powerless uncertainty and inferiority. In Grudova’s scatological anthropology, the need to take on bullshit jobs in the face of precarisation is thrown into sharp relief through the presence of a lot of actual shit — like the one a rugby player leaves on the sauna floor as a gift to the service staff.
For all that is repelling in these stories, their irresistible appeal is how they nudge against the unbounded, serendipitous experiences you open yourself up to when allowing yourself to be curious in the meeting with other people. The only proviso I would give is not to read The Coiled Serpent in the community spa. I will never be able to sit on the bench of the Oasis Sports Centre sauna again without thinking of Nell in ‘Avalon’: ‘I have a fear of getting pregnant from all the drops of sperm here.’