I had the pleasure of seeing Etgar Keret in lecture about a year ago, and
raved about it endlessly. He was back in town recently to kick off a book tour promoting his latest collection of short
stories, giving a lecture at the Chicago Sinai Synagogue. I unfortunately had a scheduling conflict, my loss. I however have now read the new book, my gain.
Etgar Keret is a much acclaimed Israeli author, currently teaching a creative writing
course at the University of Illinois at Champaign. This new book is his fourth collection of
short stories to be translated into English.
His stories are irreverent and priceless. The cover blurb on The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God captures the essence of his
work perfectly: “warped and wonderful
short stories.”
The title story from Bus Driver is a completely “wonderful”
fable, and the “warped” description fits The
Son of the Head of the Mossad perfectly.
Totally off the charts however is Kneller’s
Happy Campers. It tells the tale of several
characters that have “offed themselves” by committing suicide – but, instead of
going to heaven or hell, they are assigned to a suburb of Tel Aviv.
The first collection I read was The Nimrod Flipout, which includes a marvelous little story called
Eight Percent of Nothing. The
Girl on the Fridge opens with the one paragraph, mega attention-getting, short
story titled Asthma Attack, and
includes a totally sad but funny story titled A No Magician Birthday.
The new release, Suddenly,
a Knock on the Door, includes another mythical place: Lieland.
It is a world where all of the characters that one has ever incorporated
into one’s little white lies reside in their lied about state: i.e. I can’t
come to work today because my grandmother fell and broke her hip. And my favorite fable, which is too short to
summarize: Guava.
Almost as warped as some of the stories are the covers of
two of these books: The Bus Driver features
a smiling suicide; while Nimrod’s Flipout features an Elmer Fudd-like character
in an orange rabbit suit.
All of the 133 stories in these four collections were
originally published in Hebrew. You can order one of these books, but you might as well save yourself the trouble and order all four ... because you will want all four.
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