The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies by Ken KalfusPaul Maliszewski
Ken Kalfus. Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies. Milkweed, 1999. 289 pp. $22.00.
The Ken Kalfus of Thirst, a first collection of stories that were as varied in their settings as the forms they took (including a baseball trivia quiz, a copyright notice, and a compilation of imagined shopping malls after Calvino’s imagined cities), may not be immediately recognizable to readers as the author of this second collection. Kalfus chooses not to continue to explore the formal inventiveness of his first book. Instead, in story after story, he displays the vast range of his historical imagination.
The title story offers a picture of Moscow today, as seen through the severely botched sale of weapons-grade plutonium by a dismissed nuclear power plant worker to men who assume the powder is from Bolivia and thus best when snorted. In “Anzhelika, 13” Kalfus tells a girl’s coming-of-age story set on the eve of Josef Stalin’s death, in 1953. “Orbit” follows a restless Russian cosmonaut as he wanders the restricted base, visiting nurses and a wounded friend during the night before liftoff. Another story describes the journey and struggle of Jewish settlers in the 1920s to leave Moscow and cross seven time zones to found and colonize a Jewish state.
What is most wonderful about the variety of these stories is Kalfus’s restraint. While Kalfus is an American author, this is not Russia as seen through American eyes, at least not as one might expect it. Kalfus is just not present through any transparent proxy characters. Moody, guitarplaying expatriates, jaded journalists, and embassy diplomats—all the trusty stand-ins an author of such a collection might most easily inhabit—are completely absent. Instead, Kalfus imagines and writes a series of stories that are much more difficult to tell, and thus, all the more worth reading. [Paul Maliszewski]