The Way It Works with Women

Louis Calaferte was discovered in France in 1952 by Joseph Kessel; from that time, he published an abundance of novels and plays notable for their preoccupation with childhood, death, and Christian metaphysics, as well as for their explicit sexual content. His La mecanique des femmes, originally published by Gallimard in 1992, contributed to the author's notoriety with its incendiary eroticism and its bold portrayal of female sexuality.Now in its first English translation, The Way It Works with Women is a brutal and relentless exploration of the dark side of desire. Shocking yet poetic, the novel is composed of bits of dialogue: outbursts and exchanges spoken in the night and expressing naked physical and psychological yearning; murmurs of fragmentary declarations spoken in deserted doorways and dark hotel rooms. The women of the title -- young and old, licentious and inhibited, awkward and uncouth yet full of grace and innocence -- bare their souls to a lone attentive man, a man whose very passivity underscores the strange and powerful freedom derived from their harsh confessions.Grounded firmly in the literary tradition best exemplified in recent years by Pierre Jean Jouve and Georges Bataille, The Way It Works with Women is a stunning introduction to one of the most unusual writers in contemporary French literature. With its underpinnings in religious mysticism, Calaferte's erotic excess -- sometimes lyrical, often crude, always thought-provoking -- explores the fear and the vulnerability that seize man in the face of the infinite. And it is this excess that makes this book such a forceful meditation on the myriad contradictions of the human spirit.