A refreshing glass of prose from Ken Kalfus

COURTESY MILKWEED EDITIONS

A few of the stories in Ken Kalfus' collection, Thirst, are so good you have to close the book after reading the final sentences. You can't start another story until you've properly mourned the last one--not unlike a widow's grieving period. Better yet, given the sexual content of the book, an appropriate metaphor would be a refractory period: the narrative crescendos into a stunning climax, and you can't continue until you recover your energy.

In worlds that are often imaginary and always surreal, Kalfus spins tales that explore the meaning of home. The answers are inconsistent, if not entirely elusive, but the characters try hard to understand their relationships with home and alienation. In "A Line is a Series of Points," a migrant community, having fled its warring village years ago, inadvertently returns home. But home is oddly unfamiliar, its climate drier than they had remembered, its music and mythology slightly changed. Kalfus writes, "The billboards on the side of the highways are not in our own language, which has in the years of exile taken on the rhythms of the march and the grammar of the desert. In any event, tomorrow we will be somewhere else." They stay at home by leaving it.

In contrast to these nomads who are at home everywhere, the protagonist of "No Grace on the Road" doesn't feel at home anywhere. Estranged in his native rural India by his own worldliness, he seeks refuge in his wife's body, "without pleasure...as if I were not making love to her at all, but were burrowing inside her, searching for a place to live." Here, sex is a prospective path home.

But sex can play many roles, including the reverse--that is, as a means of alienation. As such, it plagues Nula, the young Irish au pair of "Le Jardin de la Sexualité."

Set in Paris, "Le Jardin" is the story of a somewhat antagonistic courtship between Nula and a Moroccan immigrant named Henri. When Nula refuses a drink, Henri, looking hurt, says, "This is what we drink in my country." Nula retorts, "We're not in your country," and after a pause insists, "I'm not thirsty." Henri "laughed without smiling. `In my country,' he said, `we are always thirsty.'" Though these two people call the same city home, it is clear they are from irreconcilable worlds.

While Henri is haunted by a past of perpetual thirst, Nula is horrified by a present of relentless sexual hunger in the Parisian air. On the way to a museum with her charges, Nula thinks she's blushing when lingerie ads assault her virgin eyes in a subway station. But when she's in the museum, she experiences new heights of scandal: the girls run delightedly among statues of copulating couples, and Henri, her newly acquired stalker, explains that he's getting a degree in the burgeoning field of Sexology.

These stories are steeped in metaphor; it is doubtful that any reader will believe that when Henri talks about being "so thirsty that you will drink poison," he is referring only to bodily dehydration. Sometimes the meaning of the metaphor is not apparent, but the stories just seem metaphorical, as in "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz." (As a friend put it, "It's about sports. Of course it's metaphorical.") In this enchanting series of fictional baseball records, we hear about the pitcher who threw 27 consecutive balls, the batter who hit 56 foul balls in a single at bat, and the two rival teams who made "the worst trade of players ever made"--all the players were traded to the other team in an even swap.

Kalfus' prose is accessible and eloquent. It moves at a smooth pace, and the poetry is in the details he chooses to emphasize. In "A Line is a Series of Points," the former homeland's "macaroni dishes are undercooked; its children's tales revolve around a small, cunning pig, rather than the small cunning rabbit with whom our children slide into sleep." When Henri asks Nula to meet him in Saint Denis, it "sounded to Nula like sandy knee." This observation succinctly underscores Nula's foreignness, ringing especially true to our very own anglophone ears.

A cautionary note: not all of the stories live up to my gushing introduction. Some of them ("The Republic of St. Mark, 1849," "Among the Bulgarians," and "Suit") are boring, heavy-handed, and melodramatic (respectively). Sometimes, Kalfus' fanciful creations simply don't work. He's trying just as hard, but what seemed beautifully effortless in one story seems contrived in another. His gift, when he accesses it, is in concealing the pains necessary to construct these fantastical tales. Nevertheless, Kalfus' first collection will leave you (dare I say it?) thirsty for more.

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