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Elegy for a Fabulous World
by Alta Ifland
Ninebark Press 2009, Paperback
First collection
Awards: Nominated, Northern California Book Award in Fiction
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Alta Ifland grew up in Romania under Communism, immigrating to the
United States in 1991. After writing in French for many years –
Voice of Ice, her bilingual (French-English) book of prose
poems won the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems – Elegy
is her first work written directly into English.
Read
an interview
with Alta Ifland
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"The
next year I would go back…and attempt to collect time from all the
nooks and crannies of the house, but I would always fail, for time is
never present; only we are. We are time wearing space as a mask, and
with each breath we become smaller and smaller until finally nothing
is left of us.
"
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rutherford-Johnson
Alta Ifland’s stories are preoccupied with the past, the collision
between personal memories and Eastern Europe under Communism, with
its history variously distorted, ignored, rewritten or invented.
These themes knot together in densely layered patterns of meaning,
yet rather than resulting in heavy, weighted pieces, Ifland’s shorts
are magical, often comic, the language delicate, precise and
devastating.
The collection is divided into two. “There” deals with the mythical
relatives, holidays that shimmer in the heat haze of memory and the mad
history of Communist Europe, where people “read always the same paper
with the same content… in which yesterday’s news is also tomorrow’s,
the same news of an eternal gray unreality” and “the stores were so
empty that the only things one could find on the shelves were mice and
champagne”. The second part of the collection, “Here and There” focuses
on the immigrant in America, presented in piracresque takes such as American China and Milk, or How I Became an American Citizen as a country far stranger and more puzzling and strange even than Communist Ukraine.
Language is not a stable medium for Ifland, who describes English as
her third language and whose childhood memories are made up of a
patchwork of different languages: “...we played for hours in a spectral
world of our own, she in her broken Ukrainian, I in my minimal
Hungarian, switching form one to the other and gluing them together
like the wings of a fragile, fabulous bird.” But this alienation makes
the most innocent sentence seethe with possibilities: there is always a
sense of other words, other languages lurking beneath every lexical
choice. Sawdust Power
structures itself around this linguistic interrogation to powerful
effect: “its cream façade in the melting sunlight. Or rather the
melting façade in the cream sunlight. Or rather the melting sun in the
cream light of the building’s fading lines.”
The Wedding
combines Ifland’s preoccupations with personal and political history
like a melting slab of wedding cake after too much wine – the flavours
bleed and blend and nothing tastes as it should and it is somehow
absolutely, perfectly right. This is the immigrant’s story of return –
the Daughter returns with her American husband to a post-Communist city
where marriages take place in US-style malls and the hotel is one of
the former dictator’s mansions. Yet as well as the comic energy of a
Kafkaesque parade of non-stop nuptials, there was something deeply
personal and moving about this vignette of family life left behind.
This is the old country but it is still the Daughter’s country – she
stays up late for the cutting of the cake even though she can no longer
stomach it: it still matters. History – both a person’s and a country –
cannot be papered over as quickly as malls can be erected; the
Communists found that and there is no suggestion that it is any
different under Capitalism. This is an immigrant’s tale of not
belonging – never completely at home in the new country, never able to
get away from the past, caught in a limbo between, a liminal space
which is perhaps the only possible vantage point for seeing clearly,
“to freeze forever the never-ending flow of the always present past”.
Read
a story
from this collection in Agni
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