Bøger af Alta Ifland

Where is Alma? A future husband--No. 4--is desperately seeking his fiancée, who has disappeared. To locate her, he is interviewing her three former husbands, her sister, and ex sister-in-law. Could she be hiding in a French monastery? A Japanese shukubo (temple lodging)? Or maybe she is the victim of a belief in a Balkan creation myth? Written in six voices that come together in a seamless and often comical narrative, Speaking to No. 4 is at once a meditation on our construction of space and a psychological mystery in which the main character has gone missing. As husband No. 3, the Architect, says to husband-to-be No. 4, Think of Japanese space as a novel in which the main character is absent.

An exhilaratingly comical, crosscultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn't brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. It starts in the late 1990s, after the fall of communism, and has at its center the mail-order marriage between a California man (Sammy) and a Russian woman (Tania) who comes to America, which engenders a series of hilarious cultural misunderstandings.The novel's four parts take place alternately in California and Moldova, and comprise short chapters whose point of view moves seamlessly between that of the omniscient narrator and that of various characters. Delivered in arresting prose, both realities-late 90s, bohemian/hipster California and postcommunist Moldova-thus come together from opposite points of view.Above all, this novel is a comedy of manners that depicts the cultural (and personality) clash between Tania and Sammy, Anna (Sammy's teenage daughter) and Irina, and Bill (Sammy's neighbor) and Serioja (Tania's brother). It is also a comedy of errors in the tradition of playful, multiple love triangles. The novel reaches a shocking climax involving a stolen Egon Schiele painting and alluding to the real history of East Mountain Drive, whose bohemian community was destroyed in the 2008 "e;Tea Fire."e;A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe, <The Wife Who Wasn't is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Keith Gessen (A Terrible Country), Ludmila Ulitskaya (<i.The Funeral Party), and Lara Vapnyar (Divide Me By Zero).