Author(s): Camilla Grudova

Fiction | Mel M's Book Talkers

Following Grudova's critically acclaimed collection The Doll's Alphabet, this surreal, discomforting debut novel charts the fates of a ragtag group of cinema workers who are spat out by corporate takeover.

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW: MEL M

If you are a reader who loves film history, or if you’ve ever worked at a cinema (or wanted to) – you should read this novel. It’s one of the best new novels I’ve read in a long time. Grudova’s prose is so sharp and evocative, so clearly drawn from a specific experience. At the same time she renders the story with a surrealist wash that reminds of a Leonora Carrington painting. Grudova’s short story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, was much in the same vein, and I would recommend it as well. But Children of Paradise (named after the classic French film after which the cinema in the novel is named) holds up in its own right as a story of the vagaries of working in an artistic industry that can only exist if it operates according to capitalist logic. The tension between a love and deep interest in cinema and the commercialisation of that passion is one that I felt keenly as a bookseller also.

Though often dark and grotesque, this novel is also quite funny, especially in its characterisations of the eccentric elderly owner of the Paradise, Iris, who patronises the cinema daily and bothers the staff with inane and sometimes strangely poignant small talk. You will come to love the staff at the Paradise as well in all of their pretentious and kooky glory.