Author Ken Kalfus, who will read at Maxwell’s at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 6, has drawn a lot of comment after having published only two books of short stories. Critics have called him as “tense, spare and driving” as Hemmingway, while others have labeled his work oddly superficial, yet so full of promise, he is an author to watch — despite the fact that at 45, he can no longer be considered a young talent.
His first book, Thirst, got strong praise from a New York Times review, and his latest effort PU-239 has won him the distinction of being labeled “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life.”
Although born in Bronx, Kalfus has spent a great deal of his adult life on the road, wandering through places like Moscow, Paris, Belgrade, and Dublin, out of which he has drawn a host of material, tales gathered while passing through.
While his first book gave a panoramic view of the off-beat world, PU-239 concentrates on modern day Russia, in what the New York Times called “a sterner sort of playfulness” than was displayed in Thirst.
In Russia, he lived an apartment that was run by a former branch of the KGB, one of those comic coincidences that seemed to have inspired him, almost ironic quality of life in Russia where things are generally opposite of the way they seem, and something he needed to document, not as a factual essay or a news report, but in the narrative of fiction where the deeper secrets of character could be revealed.
“When I was there, people asked me if Russia would ever become a normal country,” Kalfus said in one interview. “I told them, wait 20 years. But Russia will be normal not like Belgium, but like India.”
In this he meant, Russia will always have a fractured quality about its culture.
According to the Voice’s Literary Supplement, Kalfus “Channels the emotional plenitude of Chekhov as well as Gogo=’ wry comedy,” high praise for what many consider an rising star on the literary stage, someone whose exercise of craft now will generate a major body of work in the future.
As the husband of the Moscow Bureau Chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Kalfus lived in Moscow from 1994 to 1998, wandering throughout the region to research these stories. While the five stories and one novella in PU-239 may have focused on a single location, Kalfus has not ceased wandering, garnering his collection from various periods of time instead, sorting through the lives from a century of Russian history to bring to his book the gnarled connection between comedy and horror that seems constantly part of the average Russian=s life. In some ways, each tale is a snap shot of characters caught in history from the tale of a dying worker in a nuclear power plant selling black market plutonium in PU-239 to the preflight jitters of the first Russian Cosmonaut in Orbit.
Yet as American writer, Kalfus said Russia is similar to America in some of its development, yet different in its lack of Democratic tradition. He hoped that imaginative writers could spark an interest in America for what happens outside its own borders.
“Coming back after being abroad, I was appalled at how little interest there is [by Americans] in the world,” he said. AI hope that imaginative writers help spark the imagination of Americans in the rest of the planet.”