Review by New York Times Review
Etgar Keret's stories of Israel are punctuated with whimsy and violence. THE Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a genius, although it's not entirely apparent in "The Girl on the Fridge," his new story collection. "New" in this case means newly published, not newly written. These stories date from the mid-1980s, when Keret was a young man in the army, just starting to develop the powerful and unsettling voice that would turn him into an acclaimed spokesman for his generation of Israelis - and gain him an enthusiastic foreign audience with the publication of a collection called "The Nimrod Flipout." From the beginning, the most unmistakable aspect of Keret's style has been the length of his stories. Averaging about three pages, each presents a single fully formed incident, often surreal. In one of the stories in "The Girl on the Fridge," a man waiting on the street hears from a passerby that the buses are all dead. When he goes to the central bus station, he sees "hundreds scattered all over the place, rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their shattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt." The story manages to be both whimsical and deeply serious, a flight of fancy built around an image from the very real world of suicide bombings. Other stories are entirely realistic, slices of life showing how people behave when violence becomes commonplace. In "Moral Something," a group of Israeli children hear on television that a military court has sentenced an Arab to death for killing a soldier. Arguing about whether a person who is hanged dies of strangulation or a broken neck, they decide to settle the dispute by hanging a cat. But as the creature dangles in front of them, a girl appears. "And Michal - she's the prettiest girl in the school, probably - came by and she said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I barfed but not because of her." Keret often punctuates his stories with this type of upsetting but also vaguely funny ending. When these final sentences hit, they hit hard, like literary afterburners that push the stories deeper into your gut. Keret's characters are fragile souls, semi-despondent young men who don't belong within a hundred miles of the army but have to serve anyway. They are noncombatants, cooks and office workers who are frequently humiliated, sometimes by other men, sometimes by women, sometimes even by children. In "Loquat," a soldier's grandmother insists he put on his uniform before confronting a group of children climbing a tree in the family's yard. When the soldier asks the boys to leave, one of them yells, "Hey, homo, what are you doing walking around in uniform on a Friday night?" When they recognize his insignia, which indicates he has a desk job, they mock him for not being in a combat unit, then spit on him and beat him up. He has to be rescued by his grandmother, who picks up his fallen rifle and fires it. When the men in Keret's stories are humiliated like this, they often turn to violence. In "Atonement," a woman insults her boyfriend in public; once they get home, he beats her to death. In "World Champion," a tenant insults his landlord, whose son goes to the tenant's apartment and hits him in the face with a wrench. The son thinks about his complacent and cowardly father and the man, lying at his feet, who mistreated him. "It enraged me," he thinks. "I put the screwdriver down and gave him a kick in the head for good measure." Many of these stories feel slight, as if Keret were still working out his style, failing to match it with much substance. In "Crazy Glue," a couple fight about how well Superglue works; later, the man comes home to find his wife affixed to the ceiling. In "Freeze!" a man gains the power to stop time and uses it to make a woman fall in love with him. Although they're well constructed, these brief stories are forgotten as quickly as they're read. Yet when Keret's stories work, they present an extraordinary vision, a fresh, original and effective portrait of a society and its beleaguered young men. In three-page bursts, he shows us an Israel no longer filled with pioneers and heroes but with ordinary people - a view from the ground, as genuine as it is bleak. If you haven't read Keret, start with his 2006 collection, "The Nimrod Flipout." It shows him more fully in command, better able to connect his style to the emotion that lies beneath. After reading that book, you're likely to be a Keret fan, maybe a big enough one to wonder how his singular talent first took shape. That's the time to read "The Girl on the Fridge." Keret's characters are frequently humiliated - try other men, try women, by children. Joseph Weisberg's latest novel is "An Ordinary Spy."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like "Nothing," about a woman who "loved a man who was made of nothing" because "this love would never betray her," and "Freeze!" about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: "Not Human Beings," in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in "A Bet," when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of "Moonlighting," suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Forty-six stories in a range of tones and styles, from slapstick to surrealism. The stories vary in length between one and eight pages, and Keret (stories: The Nimrod Flipout, 2006, etc.) is able to squeeze a lot between the covers. Many of his characters are not overburdened by introspective tendencies. There's Nahum, for example, whose childhood "seemed like a cavity in somebody else's tooth--unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him," and Mindy, who in answer to her husband's query (why does she buy "crap" like superglue?) snaps back, " 'the same reason I married you...to kill time.' " Some stories, like "Hat Trick," focus on the outr, in this case a magician whose climactic trick is the banal one of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. One day, in front of a bored and diminished audience at a child's birthday party, he succeeds only in pulling out the rabbit's bloody head, much to the consternation of the magician but to the delight and enthusiasm of the partygoers. He finds that with this new trick he's much more in demand. "The Summer of '76" looks at the serene and happy reality of a child oblivious to most of the craziness surrounding him. "Knockoff Venus" has a nameless narrator who confesses to his therapist that he "needed something I could believe in. A great love that would never go away." His therapist recommends he get a dog. In "Not Human Beings," a soldier named Stein tries to put together in some coherent way his impressions of what's happening in Gaza: "He tried to put all the images together into a single, coherent reality, but he couldn't." Stein's dilemma is emblematic of Keret's method: The stories read like fragments of reality--personal, political and even metaphysical. It's hard to know how to piece them together. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
