Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In this new volume of stories from the American writer Ken Kalfus no one, innocent or guilty, can be counted safe.
The novella which gives this collection its title is an audacious fictional riff on a real-life scandal: the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, favoured candidate for president of France, arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid in New York. Couched in the form of an email apologia to the maid, this is like the story of Red Riding Hood told by the wolf.
Kalfus simultaneously gives us the narrator’s sexual obsessions and ruthless solipsism alongside the intolerable stress of trying to save the world (financially speaking) with the aid of his Blackberry and a reluctant Angela Merkel.
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