Alta Ifland, author of Elegy for a Fabulous World (Oct 20-30)

Please welcome Alta Ifland, author of Elegy for a Fabulous World. Alta will be chatting on Librarything until October 30th.

Welcome Alta! I have only just learned of your intriguing collection and have run off to add it to my Amazon shopping basket. However, it is unlikely it will arrive before the 30th.

What intrigues me about your collection — based on the descriptions I have found — is your use of the fabulous to tell your stories. Do you think your choice a natural one from someone who has grown up in a state where free speech was oppressed?

Your collection also intrigues me because I have only just finished Herta Müller's The Land of Green Plums which uses a kind of fabulous language of sorts to tell a story. Of course, what the two of you have in common is Romania...

Just for any newcomers to your world (like me)

Book description from Amazon.com

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.

Additional blurbs as posted on Amazon.com

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

Hi,

and thank you for writing. I like your ID-"ava-land." It sounds as if we are related.

The fabulous: I don't remember which Latin American writer once said that what for others is "magic realism," for the people in Latin America is simply realism. The Albanian writer Ismail Kadare also said something similar--he said that he was just describing the reality he knows, which for other people may seem fantastic or magic or fabulous.

Having said this, in my stories there is a certain fabulous element which comes, I think, from the folktales I read as a child, and also from the literature I read as an adult. I am a great admirer of Calvino, Kafka, and many others less known in the western world.

But your intuition that under dictatorship one wants to escape in a fabulous world is also right. That's why during communism people read a lot, and in free countries...not that much.

I forgot to thank you for posting the book description from Amazon. This way people can have an idea, so thank you.

Alta, how interesting and very well said. I will look forward to your book! (and one of my reviewers for Belletrista.com is interested in reviewing it for one of our forthcoming issues!)
Good luck (it is really difficult for a new author to attract attention these days unless one is writing either a vampire novel or a conspiracy thriller, isn't it?).

btw, does Ninebark have a website (I've found a FaceBook page, but not a proper website). I have one copy coming, but now Amazon is out of stock, so I'm looking for alternate sources should I need a second.

I think Ninebark is in the process of putting up a website--but they can be reached by email at ninebarkpress@yahoo.com and copies can be ordered from them. The problem with Amazon is that, when they are dealing with small publishers, they don't want to keep more than one copy in stock; so, once that copy is sold, their system shows "out of stock," which means that they have to reorder the book from the publisher, and by the time the book comes from the publisher, and then from Amazon to the customer, the customer has probably given up. I know my publisher is trying to convince Amazon to keep more copies in stock, so we'll see. At any rate, thank you for being patient, your copy will come (eventually). (Sometimes, even after Amazon receives copies from the publisher, their system still shows "out of stock")

I'll check out Belletrista.com. I am grateful for the work done by reviewers. I myself write reviews, usually about translations or books that deserve more attention than they get.

I checked out Belletrista.com--very good! I saw among other things a review of Magdalena Tulli's Flaw. I read this book and liked it, but she has an even better one, Dreams and Stones. In my opinion, Tulli is one of the greatest contemporary writers--though she is still little known outside Poland.