THE WAY IT WORKS WITH WOMEN

The first of Calaferte's many novels to be translated into English, this offensively explicit short tale, originally published in 1992, is an anatomy, so to speak, of its unnamed narrator's experiences with equally anonymous, sexually compliant women (and that's putting it mildly). There's a lot of talk about lingerie, a preoccupation with oral sex that seems more male wish-dream than female priority, and disturbingly callow fantasies about incest and copulation with children. Nabokov would have been horrified by this sleazy stuff, and Henry Miller would have proclaimed it puerile.