The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

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!).

I really like short short stories. There are tons of stories in this thin little book, some of them are only a paragraph long. It's great, because when they're bad, they've over, and when they're good, it's so great to read something so concise that can still be beautiful. That is more beautiful for being so short, even.
It's difficult to do though...and a lot of these stories fall flat, but a few are lovely so it was worth it for me to read through the rest.

I first saw Jellyfish, I think, which I liked a lot. Then I read Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, which I liked. Somewhere in the back where there is an interview she mentioned Keret (and they have worked together before.) And then I saw $9.99, which I also liked, though not as much as Jellyfish. So I decided I should read something by Keret, and The Girl on the Fridge was the first book I could get my hands on. I suppose what I did not expect was the horror aspect of the stories. The rest was familiar from the films I had seen.

I kept thinking the stories reminded me of Gaiman's Sandman comics. Not the parts about Dream and his siblings (the Endless,) but the other parts, like the serial killers who meet up in a hotel, the girl who lives in show more the building with some bizarre characters, etc. So some horror, some mystery, some bizarre, and some political commentary. If Gaiman, Lynch, and Kafka got together and wrote a bunch of short stories that take place in Israel, this could very well be it.

With that said, Keret does have that home advantage. His stories are very much culturally infused with Israel, the conflict, the everyday urban life. Some stories can easily reproduce the horror of war and conflict, the meaningless struggle. There is always some violence, whether it be a kid being bullied aside from the main story, an Arab being run over for fun by Israeli border patrol, or a severed head of a bunny. Most lead characters are male (if not all?) and most of them are not in charge of the situation. Things happen to them, and usually they suffer. Children have a special place in some of the stories, and they seem to live in the middle of a disturbing life, unaware.

All in all, a pleasure to read, only if you like this kind of thing. If you enjoy the bizarre, the horrifying, the absurd, the surreal, you will enjoy these stories. show less

A collection of very short stories about topics such as all the city buses dying, the dream eating monster under the bed, a magician who suddenly has to drop the rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick from his act, whether one should trust an artist and if finding a copy of Gulliver's Travels in Iceland is a lucky thing. Nearly all the stories are surreal, lengths range from a few paragraphs to three or four pages, and the writing is original to the point of true oddness. I'm looking forward to reading more from Keret.

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.

I've had this book on my bedside table for over a year. Maybe i just didn't want it to end. These short, acerbic, funny stories are really something special. Keret is very modern but at the same time evokes the spirits of Kafka and Bruno Schultz. Really great, unforgetable work.

I bought this at Powell's in Chicago; my wife drove and I read a few stories aloud -- which isn't problematic as most of them were less than two pages and hilariously dry. I finished before we made it to Lafyette. I would read more of his work but have since grown immune to erratic impulses to flash effect.