Die Frau, die nicht war: Ein Roman von Alta Iland (englisch) Taschenbuch Buch

The Wife Who Wasn't

by Alta Ifland

An Eastern European mail-order bride and her southern California husband clash in this dazzlingly written, rollicking comedy of manners

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

"This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chiinu to collide."—Los Angeles Review of BooksAn 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 Chiinu, 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 "Tea Fire."A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe, is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Keith Gessen (A Terrible Country), and Lara Vapnyar (Divide Me By Zero).

Author Biography

Alta Ifland was born in Transylvania (Romania), took part in the overthrow of Romania's communist dictatorship, and experienced two years of postcommunism before emigrating to the United States in 1991. She chose Moldova, Romania's eastern neighbor, for The Wife Who Wasn't because in key ways that country represents the communist world in its most excessive aspects, and as such is the perfect counterpart to California. After a PhD in French language and literature, and several years in academia, she now works as a full-time writer, book reviewer, and translator (from French, Italian, and Romanian). She is the author of two books of short stories—Elegy for a Fabulous World (2010 finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction) and Death-in-a-Box (2011 Subito Press Fiction Prize)—and two collections of prose poems—Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice (bilingual, French-English, winner of the French prize Louis Guillaume) and The Snail's Song

Review

"This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chisinau to collide."—Los Angeles Review of Books

Promotional

SOCIAL MEDIA• Print and electronic galleys--including print galleys to West Coast reps in April 2020• Outreach to friends of author and publisher (e.g. Andrei Codrescu, Mikhail Iossel) to ask them to tweet, review, or otherwise get word out about the book's publication• Facebook boosted ads at preorder and prior to publication• Blurbs and/or reviews by Andrei Codrescu (reading), Gary Schteyngart (reaching out to), and other VIP authors• Bookstore events in key West Coast cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland• Prepublication excerpts in leading publications. Excerpt forthcoming (as of early 2020) in TrafikaEurope.org

Long Description

"This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chiinau to collide." --Los Angeles Review of Books 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 Chiinau, 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 "Tea Fire." A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe, is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart ( The Russian Debutante's Handbook ), Keith Gessen ( A Terrible Country ), and Lara Vapnyar ( Divide Me By Zero ).

Review Quote

"This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chisinau to collide." -- Los Angeles Review of Books

Excerpt from Book

Part I Santa Barbara, California 1996-1997 Samuel For most of us it''s not easy to look back and pin down the exact moment when things began to change and move insidiously toward a point in the future when they would boil over and explode. For Samuel Goldstein, it was easy. Date: September 22, 1996. Location: the Los Angeles International Airport. Protagonists: a woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in a burgundy business suit with a white nylon blouse underneath and high-heeled red shoes, who, after seventeen hours of travel, is about to get off a Boeing 747, and a man in his late forties, tall, with a slight middle-age potbelly but still relatively muscular, wearing a cream linen suit, and carrying a bouquet of red roses in his right hand, and a cardboard sign with the inscription "Tania" in his left. Although the man is not bad looking for his age--he still has a full load of hair to begin with--standing there with that sign, those silly roses, and most of all, that inane smile plastered on his face, he looks like an idiot. At least, that''s what he thinks. It''s clear he''d very much like to get rid of the flowers, or the sign, but he can''t do that, so in the end he just drops his imbecilic smile. But at that very moment, the moment when he decides to stop smiling, he recognizes her. He recognizes the woman right away (though they haven''t seen each other in over half a year) not because she is very memorable, but because there is something that makes her stand out in that crowd. It may be her hair, whose puffed-up curls remind him of the sixties, or her swinging hips, marking her territory as she advances like a lioness toward prey, or her very thick ankles struggling above the high heels. When she is almost near him, he notices that her skin looks very young, white and plump like a baby''s, and her lips, equally plump, have the shine and luminescence of a wet, luscious grape. She gives him a large smile and kisses him on both cheeks. As she does this, he can feel the pressure of her fleshy breasts under her restraining suit, and when she steps back he takes notice of the cleavage that reveals the appetizing line where said breasts begin. The woman is definitely on the plump side, but not in an unpleasant way. In the car, before the air conditioning had time to kick in, overwhelmed by a pungent odor of female armpit sweat, he remembered how his parents used to send packages with basic hygienic items--soap, toothpaste, deodorant--to their relatives in Moldova. After the death of his parents, who were born there, whatever correspondence had existed with his relatives in the old country had stopped. For him, the old country was nearly a fiction, a fog out of which occasional shapes emerged only to recede immediately into the same darkness. He never would have imagined that he''d end up marrying a woman from there--not in this way. In fact, he''d had no intention of ever remarrying. After the death of his wife ten years earlier, he''d surrounded himself and his (then) six-year-old daughter with an invisible ivory fence, within which he''d created a small Paradise for the two of them, but which eventually proved inadequate for a teenage girl. Schooled at home, with no friends her own age except for Bill''s son, Todd, Anna had grown into a wild creature. When Bill had come to tell him the story he''d heard from Todd, and concluded half joking half serious that Anna needed a mother, "a woman to help her with the facts of life," for the first time he began to contemplate the possibility of remarrying. "It''s not normal for a fourteen-year-old girl" (Anna''s age at the time) "not to know where children come from," Bill had said, lighting up one of Samuel''s cigars. Todd had come home full of bruises, and when questioned, reluctantly confessed how he''d gotten a beating from Anna. He was a few months older and strong enough to prevail, but she''d taken him by surprise and, after she immobilized him on the ground, she showered him with a series of quick but incredibly powerful blows. At fourteen, Anna was taller and more robust than most girls her age; part of it was, no doubt, genetics, Samuel being himself a tall, hefty man; but more than genetics, what counted were all those years she''d spent outside, climbing trees, swimming and running like a tomboy. "So, you got beaten up by a girl," Bill had said, laughing. "Was it worth it, at least?" "She''s not a girl," Todd had replied, red with anger. "She''s an idiot." He''d made some allusion to "what married men and women do," and, intrigued, Anna had asked him to be more specific, and then he''d made an obscene gesture. Indignant, she''d asked him to stop saying "dirty things." To which, he''d replied: "These aren''t dirty things! How do you think you were conceived?" And this is when she grew enraged, repeating between stammers: "What did you say about my parents? What did you say, you ugly little prick?" In retrospect, the thing that bothered Todd most was the word "ugly." He could overlook "little prick" as an expression uttered mechanically in a moment of anger, but "ugly"? Did Anna really think he was ugly? His body still hurt from the blows and the way she''d immobilized it between her legs, as if in a vise, completely oblivious to the potential sexual implications of her position. In fact, Anna didn''t seem to be aware that she belonged to the female species, though there had been moments in the past when Todd had reasons to infer that she too went through the monthly ordeal all women go through. No, it wasn''t good for a girl her age to be so ignorant of this sort of thing, Samuel thought after Bill had left. And this is how the idea of a "mail-order bride" b0egan to creep in. It''s not that he couldn''t have found a wife on his own; what worried him was that he''d also have to marry her family and friends, and he''d labored so hard to isolate himself and Anna from the rest of the world, from its vulgarity and petty noises that often passed for communal bonding! A wife from the Old World would have the immediate advantage of being an orphan, so to speak: no family, no friends. She would be like a rescued pet, entirely dependent on him. Not to mention the supplemental advantage of a woman from a world where they still believed in taking care of the head of the family! He wasn''t particularly conservative, no, but if he was going to get married at his age, he might as well try to not lose his current privileges. Online dating didn''t exist at the time, but there were plenty of agencies that had sprouted after the fall of the Berlin Wall that tried to unite in holy matrimony the rancid poverty and hopelessness of women from one side of the wall with the taste for some exotic flesh of men from the other side. At the time, the correspondence was still on paper (at least for him it was, since he didn''t even own a computer), yet it took less than a week for the agency to send him photographs and contact information for the first woman. If the photographs were any indication of what the woman really looked like, she must have worked as a model, or whatever gorgeous women did in Moldova. She was twenty-two, had long blond hair, and had photographed herself in a skimpy, laced nightgown. After he rejected the first offer, the agency put him in touch with another woman that looked like the twin sister of the first one, and he spent a considerable amount of time on the phone trying to explain that he was looking for something, or rather someone, entirely different, someone "his mother would approve of." These were the words he came up with, exasperated by the standard forms he had to fill out, and the lack of understanding of the clerk at the other end who kept asking whether he preferred blondes or brunettes. And so, the next batch of photos included three women in their mid-thirties, who, judging from the specifications of their height and weight, were no three graces. Two of them had little kids, so it was easy to choose. He picked the one who was free, who, as it happened, was also the prettiest. The photograph was a black-and-white close-up, in which the face, tilted to the right, was circled by the sparkling glow of a silver fur hat and a dark fur collar. The woman had an enchanting smile with cute little dimples on each side, and what appeared to be light blue (or green) eyes. Her name was Tania. Now, next to her in his Subaru speeding along Highway 101, Samuel thought that that photo was at least ten years old. The youthful innocence of the girl in the photo was gone, replaced by a grimace around the mouth and a cunning expression in the eyes, which kept him on his guard. Well, let''s just wait and see, he told himself, as he always did when confronted with a confusing situation. Let''s just wait and see...

Description for Sales People

The "breakout" novel of Alta Ifland, who's carved out a name for herself in literary/translation circles with her previous books.An unusually literary and yet highly entertaining--and comical--novel about a topic of potentially broad interest: an Eastern European "mail-order"/immigrant bride's fate in suburban America.With its seamlessly interwoven, easy-to-follow contrasting perspectives, a novel rich in insights into both the culture clash that results when someone from the developing world resettles in suburban America, and into consumer culture and late 1990s America/southern California.VIP blurbs likely (e.g. Andrei Codescru will be reading it soon, reaching out to Gary Schteyngart and others)

Details ISBN1734537914 Author Alta Ifland Short Title The Wife Who Wasn't Publisher New Europe Books Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 1734537914 ISBN-13 9781734537918 Format Paperback Subtitle A Novel Pages 320 Imprint New Europe Books Illustrations No Place of Publication Clinton Country of Publication United States NZ Release Date 2021-07-01 US Release Date 2021-07-01 Publication Date 2021-07-01 UK Release Date 2021-07-01 DEWEY 813.6 Audience General AU Release Date 2021-08-23

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• Condition: Neu
• ISBN-13: 9781734537918
• ISBN: 9781734537918
• Publication Year: 2021
• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• Book Title: The Wife Who Wasn't: a Novel
• Item Height: 209mm
• Author: Alta Ifland
• Publisher: New Europe Books
• Genre: Humor
• Topic: Literature, Books
• Item Width: 139mm
• Number of Pages: 320 Pages

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