In the surreal and darkly humorous stories of Alta Ifland's Elegy for a Fabulous World, the narrator recalls an eccentric family and their polyglot friends and neighbors--Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Russians--surviving together in a space where fable, reality, and State-issued lies are impossible to untangle. In the book s second section the narratives immigrate to the United States, where the skepticism learned in fabulous youth infects and frustrates American attitudes and institutions. Real fictions of strange lands, Ifland's stories demonstrate a deep sympathy with the visionary outsider and a vital and provocative international point of view.
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Alta Ifland's short stories work from the energy of defamiliarization, as some of the best pieces of literature do. When a reader gets comfortably situated in her world, she catapults her or him into another, "dangerously" different perspective. Her universe is made of opposites: it's warm and chilly, deeply humane and strangely absurd, gentle and rough, humorous and sad. --Dubravka Ugresic
Alta Ifland's uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth. A gone world prospers in the real time of memory, its immediacies restored, its deeper significance coming clear like a shape disclosed by the archeologist's pick. --Sven Birkerts
In the fabulous world elegized by Alta Ifland, what is usually understood by living or being is nothing more than a series of moments in anyone's life, harvested by consciousness and recreated by memory. Both hemispheres of this world are populated by gray shadows, souls that accept or try to escape from the cage that cripples the soul, the demands of their physical reality: boredom or grief, natural beauty or social mores, overindulgence or good habit, hunger and pain, cultural and linguistic barriers, and the dictates of a Communist government at home or of Democratic governments in host countries. They are Soviet Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German, and French and Italian or Japanese and Armenian Americans. But for Alta Ifland, they live in the untouched brightness of truth, not facts, and in the artistic lie. Like the ocean, memory incessantly fluctuates, recreates itself, wave after wave. So the essence of every familiar experience becomes a series of constantly changing layers of existence fortified by the aggregate of the writer's imagination the truthful lie, the story. And the stories in Elegy for a Fabulous World are remarkable: intriguing, quirky, bizarre, terse, never boring and always profoundly humane and human. --2010 Northern California Book Awards Jury
Alta Ifland's uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth. A gone world prospers in the real time of memory, its immediacies restored, its deeper significance coming clear like a shape disclosed by the archeologist's pick. --Sven Birkerts
In the fabulous world elegized by Alta Ifland, what is usually understood by living or being is nothing more than a series of moments in anyone's life, harvested by consciousness and recreated by memory. Both hemispheres of this world are populated by gray shadows, souls that accept or try to escape from the cage that cripples the soul, the demands of their physical reality: boredom or grief, natural beauty or social mores, overindulgence or good habit, hunger and pain, cultural and linguistic barriers, and the dictates of a Communist government at home or of Democratic governments in host countries. They are Soviet Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German, and French and Italian or Japanese and Armenian Americans. But for Alta Ifland, they live in the untouched brightness of truth, not facts, and in the artistic lie. Like the ocean, memory incessantly fluctuates, recreates itself, wave after wave. So the essence of every familiar experience becomes a series of constantly changing layers of existence fortified by the aggregate of the writer's imagination the truthful lie, the story. And the stories in Elegy for a Fabulous World are remarkable: intriguing, quirky, bizarre, terse, never boring and always profoundly humane and human. --2010 Northern California Book Awards Jury
About the Author
Alta Ifland grew up in Eastern Europe and immigrated to the United States in 1991. She studied French literature in the States and continental philosophy in France. Her bilingual (French-English) book of prose poems, Voice of Ice, was awarded the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly a fabulous fictional world,
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This review is from: Elegy for a Fabulous World (Paperback)
This is an exquisite, beautiful collection that builds a wonderful, magical world. It is a thrilling read, as you never know what to expect next, and it contains rich imagery, and it all builds a sweet yearning. It truly creates a fabulous fictional world.
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