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June, 2015
New York Times CdF News
Coup de Foudre reviewed in the New York Times Book Review.
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Link: Charming Monster
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style, as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert admitted, and in his spectacular novella “Coup de Foudre,” Ken Kalfus has created an equally articulate monster. First appearing in Harper’s and collected now with his latest short stories, “Coup de Foudre” is a thinly — or possibly barely — veiled account of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, in which Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper at a New York City hotel. The criminal charges, which led to the disclosure of a hidden world of sex parties and erotic compulsion, came to nothing. But Strauss-Kahn eventually paid a hefty fine after a civil action, and his reputation was ruined, perhaps because of the question that was impossible to ignore: “What made him do it?” What would cause the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, wealthy and successful beyond measure, to risk everything in such a fashion?
There’s no simple answer. But one role fiction can play is to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical, to see the invisible, to describe, as Kalfus’s narrator, David Landau, cagily informs us, “the hidden lineaments of the universe.” The story is told from Landau’s point of view, as a letter to the housekeeper, and it’s chilling evidence of how easily the truth can be made to lie.
“You must wonder how I could be so smart and yet think so recklessly,” Landau offers at the beginning. “This was, however, exactly the man I was, the man I am today, the man who would save the European economy.” Yet he’s also the man who can fantasize about being masturbated “in first class.” Kalfus enters the mind of a megalomaniac who conflates his own ruin with that of the European economy — “Governments have fallen from Dublin to Prague” — and whose most gracious gesture, in his view, is to answer what seems to him the burning question: How could he assault a woman so sexually unappealing? “Every person is worthy of sexual attention,” he tells us, as if he spoke out of kindness instead of delusion. “Our fundamental human dignity demands it.” “Coup de Foudre” isn’t an easy novella to read, but it’s certainly easy to misread — as, for instance, an apologia for a brute. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a writer daring to imagine the unimaginable.
To describe the hidden lineaments of the universe — Kalfus continues this theme in the 15 stories that follow. The result is overpacked. For every perfect, beautiful story (“Square Paul-Painlevé,” with its possibly enchanted park bench) or wild intellectual experiment (a paean to the unpublished entitled “The Un-”), there are stories like “City of Spies,” “Shvartzer” and “Mr. Iraq” that feel as if they belong in a different collection. But perhaps that’s complaining about a box of chocolates having too many cordials. The very joy of a collection is that you can skip the cordials, and somebody else might love them.
Like the novella, the best work here presents a moving exploration of the ambiguous nature of reality, storytelling and the passage of time. One character, having just emerged from a dentist’s nitrous oxide haze, writes of the world as he now sees it: “Some people walk the pavement on the verge of tears. Others have just realized that they’ve fallen in love. Everyone lives in a story. . . . I’ve returned to the world, which is no more comprehensible than it ever was.” A beautiful way of putting it: that we can approach but never touch a shared experience of life.
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Link: Portrait of Wild Energy
Where goes the mind of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a titan of global finance whose ascent toward the French presidency collapsed when he was charged with sexually assaulting a maid in a $3,000-a-night New York hotel suite? What motivates this Caligula of currency, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, acquitted on attempted rape charges (although he settled a civil suit with his accuser), who now awaits a verdict on pimping charges in France for his role in jet-setting orgies? We can't know for certain, but Ken Kalfus uses fiction with wild energy and abandon to explore such a mind-set in his excellent novella Coup de Foudre.Originally published in Harper's Magazine in April 2014, the story is told in the form of a confessional letter from David Lèon Landau, a character identical to Strauss-Kahn, to the unlucky maid, a West African immigrant. He opens the letter to her, however, by declaring that he will never send it. Imagine Humbert Humbert being acquitted and writing an apology he withholds from Lolita.
Landau's letter raises a question that brings to mind sex scandals involving Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton. "You must wonder how I can be so smart and yet think so recklessly," he says.
Lust is one answer. Everywhere Landau goes, in airports and on the streets of New York, this "ridiculous old goat of a man" sees women he tries to seduce. And he has these thoughts while trying to save the global economy, anticipating a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom he finds a "stolid, dreary woman."
"Coup de Foudre" - French for "thunderbolt" - operates on many levels, touching on poverty, race, immigration, AIDS, prostitution, and - through an unflinching discussion of genital mutilation - women's rights in Africa.
Fifteen short stories fill out the book. There are several gems, but a few don't quite sing in full voice. Any serious reader, however, should be excited to read the work of a writer with Kalfus' talent. A native New Yorker, and a Philadelphia resident since 1998, Kalfus, 61, has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and he has received both the prestigious Pew and Guggenheim Fellowships. Read "Coupe de Foudre" to see firsthand why his writing is so highly regarded.
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Link: Book Reporter