The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

recommended by: Rachel Donovan

Many readers seem to think this author is a genius and his stories are wonderful. Perhaps, but my opinion differs. They were not to my taste.

This book has 171 pages and there are 46 stories; they’re obviously very short. Thankfully, for me, they were short and the book was short.

As I read I had a sheet of paper handy with loved, liked a lot, and liked as categories, for writing down short stories that fit each one. The results?: none that I could wholeheartedly put on any of those lists, although there were many stories where I really liked parts of them and was able to appreciate the effort. Many of the story titles were intriguing so I was eager to try many of them.

I felt assaulted by many of the stories. I disliked many of these enough to hopefully block them out of my memory and (only partially tongue in cheek) I’m hoping my memory has faded sufficiently that I won’t have much to contribute to my book club discussion in three weeks. I do like dark and disturbing books, including books that share some of the themes of these stories; I just didn’t enjoy this book. The worst of it is these stories didn’t even depress me or evoke any emotion, but left me mostly unmoved.

If not for my book club I would have stopped reading very early on.

I’m not saying these have no redeeming value and I don’t like discouraging others from reading books, even if I’m not a fan, so I say read the reviews written by other Goodreads’ members! However, I am a fan of the short story form and have often appreciated short stories that are very short, but not these.

However, I am genuinely curious what my book club members think of this book and I’m eager to hear from those who enjoyed these stories in order to find out what they enjoyed about them.

What I’m perturbed about is I’ve been eager to get my average rating for my Goodreads read shelf books back up to 4.00 from 3.99 because I do actually “really like” almost all the books I read. My uncharacteristic star rating of this book will significantly delay that shift. ( )

I liked this one, but not as much as The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, I think. As a whole, this collection was less twisted, if equally dark. Favorite stories were "Asthma Attack" and "Sidewalks". Keret is entertaining in person, too: he did a reading at Housing Works last week. ( )

I was really expecting to like this book better than I did. My previous (and first) Keret book was The Nimrod Flip-out which I liked much better. The story I liked the best in The Girl on the Fridge was "Super Glue" which tells about odd uses for superglue. I found "Loquat" a fun read as well. This short story was about a soldier whose grandmother commanded him to get annoying neighborhood kids out of their loquat tree. I found the other stories in this collection much too dark and disturbing. I do like the author's bizarre way of telling a story and looking at snippets of Israeli life, though. I will definitely read more books by Keret, but hope that some of the stories in future collections that I read will be lighter and more fun. ( )

This collection is a little more uneven than The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God (because it's a compilation of older stories from the early 90s, rather than a collection conceived by Keret), but it does contain my personal favorite story of his: "Crazy Glue," which may be the best love story ever written (and it's only three pages long). Not to mention the shortest of the stories in the book ("Asthma Attack," which is 11 lines long), which has more heart than most novels I've read. When he's at his best, Keret's stories are on par with Borges at his best - when he's at his worst, on par with Borges at his worst (so still pretty darn good!). ( )

This is my second Keret collection I've read (The first being The Nimrod Flip-Out). Honestly, if you were to choose a Keret book to read for the first time, I would go with TNFO. The Girl on the Fridge was a fairly good collection of stories. Some of them are capable of giving you goosebumps, however others bore you so much that you continue reading just for the sake of finishing the story. However, Keret is a good writer as a whole with some beautiful prose (which may be a translator's touch, but probably not...). Keret is very in touch with human emotions and is great at conveying his meanings in very few words. ( )