Imagen del autor
7 Obras 67 Miembros 6 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Incluye el nombre: Alta Ifland

Créditos de la imagen: My photo

Obras de Alta Ifland

Elegy for a Fabulous World (2009) 17 copias
Death-in-a-Box (2011) 12 copias
The Darkroom (Le camion) (2021) — Traductor — 7 copias
The Snail's Song (2011) 3 copias
Speaking to No. 4 (2022) 1 copia

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugares de residencia
California, USA
Educación
PhD French lit
Ocupaciones
writer
Premios y honores
Louis Guillaume Prize (2008)
Subito Press Prize (2010)
Biografía breve
Born in Romania; immigrated to the United States in 1991.

Miembros

Debates

Reseñas

THE DARKROOM (Le Camion, Les Éditions de Minuit 1977) contains the script for Duras’s 1977 radically experimental film Le Camion (The Truck), as well as four manifesto-like propositions, in which Duras complains that most movies “beat the imagination to death'' because they “are the same every time they are played.” In these propositions and in the 53-page interview with Michelle Porte that follows, Duras describes her own approach to filmmaking, speaking about everything from her biography to her deconstruction of Marxism.

Much of the hour-and-twenty-minute-long film consists of the sounds and images of a truck rumbling through an industrial landscape dotted with dilapidated, immigrant shantytowns. Periodically, the images of the truck are interrupted by cutaways of Marguerite Duras and Gérard Depardieu sitting in Duras’ living room, reading from a script that includes a dialogue between a staunchly communist truck driver and an anonymous, ethnically-unidentifiable woman who stands in as an alter-ego for Duras and at the same time a substitute for “everyone.” Neither of the characters are ever shown on-screen. The truck driver quickly decides the hitchhiker is “a reactionary” suffering some kind of “mental disturbance.” Using the “mad,” uneducated woman (who, is, nevertheless, interested in everything from the position of the earth in the universe to politics to such august personalities as Proust, Corneille and Marx), Duras criticizes the invasion of Prague by the Soviets in 1968 and its support by the French Communist Party.

Note: this book is translated by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand--but Amazon and Goodreads failed to list the second translator
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Denunciada
Ifland | Apr 16, 2021 |
I seem to be reading and enjoying more and more short fiction - a short story gives you just enough to make you think, but not too much. Where a short story shines a narrow torch beam on a mysterious, shadowy object, a novel-length tale can often show you too clearly just how mundane an item it really is.

This collection has a wide variety: memories of the past and dreams of the future, melancholy and humour, subverted expectations, warped reality. These are the sort of stories that I *don't* want to tell you about: they are best experienced first-hand, creating mental images that will stay with you.

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Full disclosure: I received a free review copy via the Goodreads.com First Reads giveaway.
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Denunciada
stevejwales | Apr 26, 2013 |
It took me longer than I thought it would to read this book. I think this is because the poems are relentless in their sameness. This is definitely part of the poet's point, I think, so it's not necessarily a flaw, but I will admit that after a while it dragged on my enthusiasm. The book contains bleakly compelling, surreal prose poems that explore the concept of "the self", and the destruction, dissolution, and eventual reconstruction of one's concept of identity. Some of the poems would stand alone very well, while others are probably stronger as part of the collection, but on the whole they work together seamlessly to create a dreamlike, consistent vision.

Ifland's sensibility is one of visceral, bloody violence: "His eyes have been burst, and in their place there are now two dark holes, surrounded by blood clots...and I see the knife rising and stabbing the empty sockets, and behind the holes the gaze is not yet dead." The poems reminded me of Rimbaud (I'm thinking in particular of "Voyelles", with its strange mix of the grotesque and the ecstatic). There are recurring images of seeing and speaking, eyes and bones, silence and song, material and immaterial birth/death, and a consideration of what constitutes a writer's self. The writer's self is particularly complicated in Ifland's world, because there is "[n]o language. Absolutely no language." The speaker in the poems mourns, "My language doesn't belong to me", but at the same time yearns to "write a first line that belonged to no one and would be the exact opposite of the desire to write that gave birth to it."

This is a bilingual edition (French-English) and the author did her own translation from the French. I became obsessed with tracking the differences between the French and the English versions of the poems, and the liberties that the poet took with her own work. For example, the first line from "Le chat, la souris et le Merlot" ("The cat, the mouse, and the Merlot") is "Dans un panier: des noix, deux oefs, quelques noisettes, un orange, une oie." Which literally translates (I think) to: "In a basket: some nuts, two eggs, some hazelnuts, an orange, a goose." But Ifland's English translation reads: "In a basket: some nuts, a cup, duck mousse, an orange juice, a goose." It could be that my very limited French prevents me from understanding additional meanings of the French phrases, or the connection to the English vocabulary that Ifland chooses. Nevertheless, I find it fascinating to note what Ifland conveys in French, what she conveys in English, and to consider why she might vary her content based on the language she's writing in.
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½
1 vota
Denunciada
aschrader | otra reseña | Apr 23, 2011 |
Esta reseña ha sido escrita para Sorteo de miembros LibraryThing.
Upon reading this book, I found many of my preconceived notions about what it means to be a memoir (which I know this was not in the strictest sense, but in many ways it read in that narrative style, which quite piqued my interest), a work of contemporary fiction in general to be in shambles...in a rather enjoyable way. The stories contained within kept me guessing at every turn, playing with form, narrative style, and slightly surreal imagery in very unique and clever ways.

The world Ifland presents is both foreign and familiar. The Eastern Europe of which Ifland writes is not a place that I, myself, have ever known and yet I feel as though I am right there while reading it. "Elegy for a Fabulous World" combines folklore and a child's world view with realism and the cynical attitudes of an adult. The juxtaposition between the surreal and the completely real place the reader at a crossroads where they find themselves fully absorbed within the tale Ifland has woven for them. I am reminded of writers such as Flannery O'Connor and yet "Elegy" has an quality all it's own. This book is everything contemporary "gothic" literature (though I am deeply hesitant to put this book into any one genre) should be.… (más)
 
Denunciada
addictivelotus | Jan 19, 2010 |

Estadísticas

Obras
7
Miembros
67
Popularidad
#256,179
Valoración
½ 4.3
Reseñas
6
ISBNs
8

Tablas y Gráficos