: Camilla Grudova
: Children of Paradise Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
: Atlantic Books
: 9781838956332
: 1
: CHF 8,90
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
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...

Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh where she works as a cinema operator and waitress. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is the critically-acclaimed author of The Doll's Alphabet (2017) and Children of Paradise (2022).

Midnight Cowboy


Directed by John Schlesinger


1969

The Paradise cinema had a gaudy interior and a pervasive smell of sweet popcorn and mildew. It was built on the ground floor of a block of flats around the time of the outbreak of the First World War, its entrance like the building’s gaping mouth, a sparkling marquee teeth grin with the word PARADISE written in pale yellow neon. They tore down some of the flats to put the cinema in. I imagined someone with a giant cake knife cutting out whole living rooms and bedrooms with people in them, and throwing them away, replacing regular, mundane lives with glamorous Hollywood ones.

I would’ve passed the Paradise without looking if it weren’t for the handwritten ‘We’re Hiring’ sign on its big dusty glass doors. I had just arrived in the city, and in the country, by train, and needed a job.

I’ll call myself Holly, like the girl fromBadlands.

The current head manager of the Paradise was named Sally. She looked like she was in her late thirties, but later someone told me she was almost fifty. She wore rockabilly clothes: a vintage dress and a white fur coat with a Betty Boop badge on it. She told me that she had put herself through college by winning beauty contests. She had freckles all over her face, barely discernible under a layer of makeup. She wore a fifties style turban – the only part of her hair that I could see was her red bangs, but I could still tell underneath that she had a face like Judy Garland’s. She was a foreigner too, she had a midwestern American accent, she said she was from the same stateWizard of Oz was set in. Why she moved here didn’t make sense to me. It only seemed natural that someone like her would’ve made her way to Hollywood with a suitcase full of vintage dresses and the last of her beauty queen money rather than a country like this one that seemed to have more graveyards than anything else. Perhaps she wondered why I moved here too.

During my interview with Sally, when she asked my favourite film genre, I said the first thing that popped into my head, as she was sat in front of me in her pale blue fifties taffeta dress. ‘Clowns, anything with clowns,’ I said. ‘And Charlie Chaplin.’ We were sitting at the one table in the tiny bar, attached to the cinema lobby, her coat thrown over the one empty chair. The white fur had yellowish tinges in it, the way popcorn does.

The bar was where customers could get drinks to take into films or drink at the one table or two rickety bar stools by the zinc countertop. Whenever I touched the table or moved my feet the entire bar seemed to rattle, the shelves of oddly shaped glasses for obscure cocktails, the dim-coloured liquors, the jar of pickled eggs, olives with tiny red tongu