Etgar Keret

Surreal, unexpected, funny, devastating - Keret's stories are that and more. They can be about anything: Israeli border guards, ex-lovers, magicians, angels, or anteaters, but they always have something to say about the human condition, whether in a funny or heart-wrenching manner. Keret manages to say in a few pages, sometimes in a few lines, what other writers take hundreds of pages, or even several books to say.

{The writer} misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right -- something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.

This collection contains one short story and 34 very short stories and flash show more fictions translated from the Hebrew. If you’ve read Keret you know exactly what these stories are like. If you haven’t, think Kafka and characters whose denial of their circumstances takes them over the edge into “something out of something” alternate realities where they can feel again.

Very imaginative! Sometimes funny. Together, almost too sad. Still, I liked or loved at least half the stories -- my favorite here is also the first I ever read by Keret, Creative Writing -- and I’d read another of his collections … after I buoy up a bit. show less

Like modern Zen koans, Keret’s offbeat stories—most of them on the short side—add up to more than the sum of their parts. From “Goodeed,” an app connecting rich women with homeless men, to a future army that enlists high schoolers by offering Pokémon Go–type prizes, these are darkly funny pieces that gently but pointedly comment on how we live now.

Reading Etgar Keret is refreshing for me because he embodies much of what's good about Israeli literature without too much of the baggage. Now, I adore the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman, AB Yehoshua (to an extent), Yoram Kaniuk, Aharon Appelfield, and the like, but sometimes their respective works can be so heavy, thick with the angst and long suffering neuroses and obsessions of the Jewish people. It can be a distinct drag, man. This isn't to say that Keret's work is free of these show more descriptors, far from it, it's just that being a significantly younger and more modern writer gives Keret's voice a lighter and less deliberately austere voice. I feel as though I'm witnessing the lectures of other Israeli writers as I read their works (for good and ill) but with Keret I honestly can imagine myself talking with the writer in some overpriced Tel Aviv beach side bar. Call that my overly circuitous manner of saying Keret comes off as much more initially human and approachable than many of his literary predecessors.

From this collection of stories (which was new back when I lived in Israel, my God the time flies) it's evident that Keret is in fine form and his voice is finely honed. Has he reached the heights of (some) of his forebears? Not quite. But that's part of what makes Keret such a fascinating writer to watch. Much like a Philip K. Dick mixed with Raymond Chandler (and just a bit of Kafka) Keret style is standard but amorphous, constantly shifting with each new piece of content but never losing its distinct flavor and efficacy. He might not reach the vaunted heights of the nobel 'types' but Keret just might establish himself as a writer of stories more far reaching and more deeply embedded in the world literary culture than his current literary elders can boast. show less