The Priestess Iftat, a wild ride into the imagination

Today I will try to make a review of this magical book “The Priestess Itfat.”

After finishing this wild ride I can say I’m’ very pleased. It starts hard but is definitely worth it.

When I started reading the book, it reminded me of the first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was a kid (you can imagine…), especially the parts between the “Time Warp” and “The Sweet Transvestite.” So shocking so weird, so… strange, like “What the F… is going on here!”

There are other two things I can connect the beginning of this book with:

If you are a Cinema aficionado, it is similar to the movies by Alejandro Jodorowsky. But mind you, those are not for the faint of heart. Once you have seen them, you can’t “unseen” them (No, seriously).

By the way, as a side note, Alejandro Jodorowsky was going to be the original director of “Dune.” The project was really ambitious. It had Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger as actors, and Pink Floyd was in charge of the soundtrack. But maybe the producers freaked out and gave it to David Lynch instead, with the results we all know. (There’s a documentary about that project, very interesting).

It also has the feeling of one of the greatest novels of Russian Literature, “The Master and Marguerite” by Mihail Bulgakov (no surprises here).

And last, on a lighter note, it reminded me of a Saturday Night Live skit that’s one of my favorites because it’s very weird (but also funny). You can check it as “Drive-Thru Window – SNL.” The characters will remind you of some of the ones you’ll find in the book.

So, before reading it I was confused because it was described as an “art book.” I thought it was the same book as Tufti, only with illustrations. No, is not. What they mean with an art book is that it is a novel. This time, Vadim chose another medium to convey the knowledge of Tufti. We can say these are the same topics, but he is presenting them to us through characters, dialogs, and a narrative.

What’s the reason for this? I don’t know for sure, but it could be that he tried to reach not the “logical” mind or the “left brain” in which he wrote all his previous books. You know, like a non –fiction book. Maybe he wanted to take our judgment and preconceived notions as far away as possible, and the only way to do that was scrambling our heads with that beginning of the book.

He himself gives us a hint at an “intermezzo” halfway through the book (I will talk about that later). But the beauty of this is discovering it step by step as you are reading it.

We have eight main characters in this story, which of course the leading one is our beloved Tufti, only that here, her name is Itfat. I will paste here an explanation I took from the Internet, about why this thing of the name backward (kind of). I talked about that already in another post.

Here’s the paste:

“A NOTE OF THE NAME ITFAT

In the original work in Russian, her name is Тафти. When translated to the Roman alphabet, some Russian alphabet is quite ambiguous and therefore can be translated into some versions: Tufti, Tafti, Tufty, Tufts. The second book is originally Итфат, the reverse of Тафти. So it could be Itfut, Itfat, etc. The name is supposedly derived from the Egyptian Hetpet Priestess.

The name Iftut is her middle name, so it is "Tufti Iftut".

Or in this case, “Tafti Itfat,” so here we go and have Itfat.”

All of that because the novel is set in the Mirror World.

So besides Tufti or Itfat, we have another character, which I immediately fell in love with: Matilda. Think of her as another kind of Tufti, but instead of being red, she is blue, with blue hair, a green jumpsuit, and pink shoes (platform shoes, actually). So lovely! She’s like a “human” version of Itfat, and they both will get along through the story and discover the secrets of reality.

The other “team” is the one made of the characters Brunhilda, a Queen; Adya, an intellectual; a Submarine (that walks and talks), an Orange Cow (she also flies), a Beast and a tribe girl who is also a cat.

The novel is set in two worlds (or maybe two aspects of the same world): the “real” world (if you can call that place that way) and the Mirror world, the world where you can change the image so you can change the reflection.

Although we don’t have an exact date, the introductions say that these things happened like 100 million years ago, maybe in one of the previous iterations of the Earth.

First, we find Tufti took away from her Priestess world, and this is funny because this novel is a prequel to Tufti the Priestess and I have news for those of you worried about her calling us snails, idiots, and losers. We don’t have any of that here. This Tufti or should I say Itfat is very humble. Maybe she is a junior version of what she will become, so don’t’ worry, she’s “one of the guys” in this story.

So we have Tufti snatched from her temple, probably from Egypt, and transported to an unidentified time and place. We also have Matilda, who is a stage actor, snatched to and transported to that same place that we can identify as the Mirror World. Many weird things happen in this world. The first one is the apparition of a Mirror Wall in the middle of the city, which reflects somehow that world, but not quite so. The mirror wall also exists in the “real” world of those other Looney characters.

Tufti has lost her memory at a point that she believes her name is Itfat (well, that’s part of her name actually). Maybe that’s the reason she is not obnoxious here; she doesn’t remember who she is.

She will have to find out where she is and what she has to do.

In Matilda’s case, she wakes up in this strange world and is attacked by these minions, (that are just like THOSE Minions) in one of the most bizarre scenes of the book.

The weirdness is at the same time silly and funny because we have gems like this one:

At one point when the minions (they are actually called Glamrocks) want to eat Matilda, they say this:

Mom - mia, hir a go egen,

Ma - ma, ha ken a resist u.

Mom - mia, daz it sho egen,

Ma - ma, give ha mach ah mist yu.

Es Av bin Brokenhare

Blue Sin Ze Dai Vi Pare.

Wai - wai, did and eva years old.3

And then you scratch your head trying to decipher this language and to understand the hidden meaning of these cryptic words.

HINT: look no more, go up and read that again singing “Mamma Mía” by Abba, and there you have it, you are welcome. (I see that Vadim likes Abba very much, he talks about the group in Transurfing I-V).

From there, our heroines find each other and then create a bond similar to the one we have in this Facebook group. They become real friends, and together they go to find out what the f… is going on there.

More important (I hate to say that word!) they discover along the way, how to control reality. Things happen to them, but each one of them produces a lesson that will help them understand that the world is a movie and how they can manage the process of changing film rolls and scripts. But you, as a reader, make sense of this way ahead in the novel. Then, you wanna go back and read the first chapters with another outlook, having a new level of understanding.

The “other” team is even weirder, with the talking submarine and the flying cow. They are supposedly located in “our” world. This is not said plainly but inferred. They have a journey too, a journey of discovery. Together, both groups go uncovering the truths of our reality.

Almost all of the concepts in Tufti the Priestess are there, but they are presented in an allegory way. The characters do actions that represent what we read in the book. They encounter challenges that we read about in the book, but they are presented to us as a story, with dialogues and especially: action. Is not the same you been told something that you being “showed” that something or how it is done. Some people learn better that way.

The weirdness keeps along the way, but maybe you get used to it and start to make sense of it, because near the end that didn’t affect me so much.

This book tries to solve questions related to the “how to’s”, technique issues, and the "whys." It is inferred too that it will be at least a sequel, and I will be eagerly waiting for it.

Now, talking again about why Vadim chose this format to present these ideas, why this level of “craziness,” let's hear what he has to say with his own words. Here’s an extract of the book:

“Judging by the fact that incredible or even impossible things happen to our heroes, it may seem that this whole story is fictitious. However, this is not at all true. In - First, the mind is not able to come up with. And in -the second, where did you see that some characters - some fantastic pieces wondered what happens to them, and called themselves the incredible happening?

In fact, it narrates reality in an unfamiliar guise. Or rather, about the unknown side of reality. The incredible does not mean the impossible. And even the impossible is hardly categorically and indisputably impossible

A person is too little aware of the world around him to authoritatively declare what, in principle, is possible and what is not. If we distract from the usual stereotypes, we live in a very strange world, extremely reluctant to give in to knowledge…

…After all this, what can the mind know about the Universe, or let's just say, about reality? Moreover, the reality is just one aspect of reality. Reality as a whole includes everything that was, what is, and what could be. The first and third, relatively speaking, refers to materiality. The second is to reality. But what is the fundamental difference between the one and the other?

Our heroes still have not been able to determine how the world of dreams differs from the manifest world. So far, the "impossible" is happening with them in materiality. But who dares to state unequivocally that in reality, this cannot take place? “It is possible or impossible” is only from the point of view of the mind. But “real or unreal” is a completely different matter, which has nothing to do with reason.”

So there we have it. I think it is evident.

I enjoyed this book very much. Needs more than one read (well, all of them do). I invite you to join this crazy ride. In the end, you will be shaken, but with a good deal of knowledge.