A collection of stories from a Romanian-American writer, nominated for a Northern California Book Award, juxtaposes stories from the old country and the new.
I once learned of a fascinating conundrum. “Those who know don’t tell,” remarked the wily subject of a newspaper article I was writing, “and those who tell, don’t know.” He was messing with me but also getting at a truth that confronts fiction writers, especially when the stories they want most to tell come from a world remote from their readers’ experience.
In the short-story collection Elegy for a Fabulous World, her first book written in English, Romanian-born writer Alta Ifland conveys what it was like to grow up in Eastern Europe under Communism. Acknowledging the limitations of memory and claiming a reverence for truth, while expressing a contempt for facts (the raw ingredients of propaganda, infinitely susceptible to spin), Ifland lays down her reality manifesto in one of the volume’s first stories: “As soon as I became conscious of existing, I was aware of a strong impulse in me for mystification, for the artistic lie.” In the strongest of Ifland’s stories, the artistic lie functions as a kind of meander, allowing her watery narratives to flow in and out of places the reader never expected them to go.
“The Road to Dombrad” is a fine example of Ifland’s style. Initially the story seems to be an autobiographical sketch, a fond recollection of a small-town caged bear. With deadpan humor, the narrator observes that when children stuck their hands through the bars of the cage to feed the bear, the omnivorous fellow “would take, together with the candy, the child’s arm too, and sometimes even the whole child… With time, the park bear grew quite unpopular among our town’s good folks.”
But what is “The Road to Dombrad” really about? After an amusing digression on Eastern European weddings, and some extraordinarily good descriptions of relatives fat and thin, readers suddenly find ourselves at a train station. Now the narrator settles in to recount an overnight trip to Dombrad taken during the “coldest winter in half a century.” The tone of the narration up to this point leads us to expect a rollicking adventure, but the trip seems uneventful. We hear in great detail of a cold night on a train. Not until the shocking penultimate paragraph do we learn that some passengers froze to death in their seats. The narrator concludes:
I joined the little line that had formed in the narrow corridor with the sensation that my bones were reluctant to follow me. But they were my bones and the pact of life still existed between us. The train stopped and I stepped out into the blinding daylight.
In the title story, first published in the journal AGNI, Ifland’s talent for portraiture is on full display. Such fat aunts! Such “voluptuous,” “obsessive” uncles! Best of all is her description of Sandra, a twelve-year-old Hungarian girl whose “Botticellian face was in sharp and unexpected contrast with her abrupt, razor-blade personality.” Sandra’s friendship with the narrator blossoms during a summer vacation spent at a beach resort; it’s a Black Sea idyll, filled with Hungarian dominoes, outdoor movies, lace curtains blowing in the wind during afternoon naps, and sardonic judgments made by the two girls against everybody else. The most active thing around is the narrator’s memory; but the story is saved from static sentimentality by the searing contrast between an interlude of happiness and “the reality that suffocated us with its gray slime dripping off the TV screens where thousands of Pioneers marched in the same hypnotic rhythm toward the peaks of Communist Neverland.”
Always atmospheric and often allegorical, these stories, especially in a second section subtitled “Here and There,” can sometimes seem contrived. In tales set in the U.S., Ifland pokes fun at American-style consumerism, with its well-known excesses, and her take on the classic trope of a young girl attracted to her professor is insightful. But overall, Ifland’s writing about the West seems more distant and abstracted than the self-described “shadow” who portrays in such loving detail a region left behind.
Elegy for a Forgotten World was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in fiction, one of four short-story collections and only two novels. The predominance of short stories in the category is an impressive affirmation of the vigor of the form. Ifland’s approach to storytelling as a “truthful lie” makes for deliciously surprising reading.
