ABSTRACT
Intensifying eye-witnessed events by means of fictional additives constitutes, of course, a common act of literary artifice. In Louis Calaferte"s case, however, persistent doubts trouble the mind of any reader cognizant of the writer's sharp diaristic commentary and of his avowals, to interviewers, that his own imaginative life was "practically non-existent". Calaferte adamantly espoused the "personal" and the "intimate" as the most appropriate subjects for literature. As elsewhere, Calaferte acknowledges that "defeat" in The Way it Works with Women; but he also and especially celebrates "life" as it emerges—once again, paradoxically—through the darkest and most licentious forms of passion. Perhaps the most difficult to classify and the least understood of the important contemporary French writers, Louis Calaferte has produced an abundant oeuvre so multifarious in style and genre that only the broadest themes (notably childhood, sex, death, and Christian metaphysics) at first seem to provide any underlying unity.
