Maxing Out On Minimalism

The celebrated short story writer Etgar Keret’s new collection is hit and miss.

In the swim? Keret can dazzle in one story yet elicit a yawn in the next.

by Diane Cole
Special To The Jewish Week

The Girl on the Fridge,
by Etgar Keret. Translated from the Hebrew
by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 171 pages. $12.)

If you’re looking for a breezy read of shorter-than-short stories that aim to be hipper-than-hip, first honors this summer go to Israeli author Etgar Keret’s latest collection of fiction briefs to appear in English, “The Girl on the Fridge.”
Born in 1967, Keret has garnered phenomenal reviews in Israel as well as abroad for his stories, graphic novels, and films (most recently, “Jellyfish,” on which he collaborated with his wife, the actress and director Shira Geffen). His books routinely appear on Israeli bestseller lists, and Arabic is among the 19 languages into which they have been translated. Awards for both his fiction and films have come his way in abundance, and a litany of literary critics have declared him Israel’s most important younger writer (that is, younger than Oz, Yehoshua and Appelfeld), He is recognized as a representative voice of the generations whose political consciousness did not come into being until well after the Six-Day War.

But the praise is not unanimous. Keret has been assailed as a nihilist, denounced as anti-Zionist and chastised for writing politically edged stories with a leftist bent that deliberately (and, clearly, successfully) aim to provoke.

When a book arrives saturated with that much hype and controversy, you’ve got to wonder: What’s all the fuss about? The only way to answer is to read his work and decide to — well — decide for yourself.

That’s what I set out to do, curling up with three of Keret’s books: in addition to “The Girl on the Fridge,” they included “The Nimrod Flip Out” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12) and “The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God” (Toby Press, $12.95). All three volumes are super-slim paperbacks (the longest is 171 pages), and all three contain a multitude of sketches (most range in length between one and four pages) that run the gamut from brilliant to tiresome, from pretentious to possibly profound, from sick jokes that can make you titter even as you cringe to indecipherable mental doodlings that leave you scratching your head in puzzlement.

In short, Keret is everything the critics say about him, pro and con. Even in his variability — his capacity to dazzle you in one story, only to elicit a yawn in the next — he shows himself a master at keeping readers off kilter in every possible way. Which is, perhaps, his point.

In published interviews, Keret has identified as inspirational literary influences Kurt Vonnegut’s darkly comic anti-war novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”; Franz Kafka’s seminal tale of surreal transformation, “Metamorphosis”; and William Faulkner’s classic Southern novel, “The Sound and the Fury,” a narrative fractured into four sections, each one chronicling the distinct point of view — as revealed in their stream of consciousness — of a different character. The techniques and sensibilities of all three authors suffuse Keret’s work, but (to judge by his translations in English, as well as by reports from those who have read his work in Hebrew) he brandishes little stylistic flair, preferring a slang-filled, street-smart conversational tone. Yet this matter-of-fact, deadpan delivery serves its purpose: it heightens the disconnect between the narrator’s emotional numbness and the shocking nature of the events he’s narrating.

At his best, Keret seamlessly mixes the grim details of terrorist attacks with surreal flights of fancy, lending his work the cumulative power of a disquieting nightmare without end. In “The Night the Buses Died,” for instance, a nameless first-person narrator innocently follows a street of eerily deserted bus stops until he at last arrives at the central bus station, where he discovers hundreds of fragmented vehicles, “rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their scattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt.”
In other stories, Keret transforms seemingly ordinary incidents into macabre jokes that can easily double as editorials on the daily news, or commentaries on the grim ways humans can learn to live amid the constant threat of violence and war. Thus, in “Hat Trick,” a children’s party magician attempts to pull a rabbit out of his hat — and out comes a rabbit’s severed head; a subsequent attempt yields a dead baby. In “Not Human Beings,” when a newly recruited Israeli border policeman attempts to stop his colleagues from viciously assaulting an Arab (PLO flags flow from the victim’s slit open stomach), the policemen turn on the new recruit, beating him into silence and leaving him unmoored and without a moral compass.

Keret’s characters tend to be young, anonymous everymen whose emotional state is best described as an existential numbness that borders on the suicidal. When, in “Vacuum Seal,” a soldier in basic training surreally covers himself with a vacuum seal bandage, the implication is that the only way to survive is seal oneself off to all emotions; even so, as the story ends, the soldier is holding his razor to his throat.
Yet, taken to the opposite extreme, this numbness can explode in violent rage. “Atonement,” for example, describes an insulted husband (one of the many silent, distant, macho men who inhabit these stories) who mercilessly beats his wife as soon as they return home from synagogue.

On rare occasions, emotion does break through, if fleetingly: “Crazy Glue” ends with the Chagall-like image of a husband levitating from the floor even as he attempts to kiss the lips of his wife who has glued herself to a chair glued, in turn, to the ceiling.
As disquietingly powerful as these stories can be, others simply misfire, and when they do, Keret’s bizarre images and dream-like ramblings begin to sound repetitive. Indeed, as paradoxical as it sounds, you can even max out on minimalism.

So do I like Keret’s stories? I’m left with an opinion as mixed as the work itself. Prolific, provocative and as assuredly talented as he can be spotty, Keret is a writer worth spending some time with. And since the time it takes to read one of his short-shorts is roughly equivalent to the time between waves at the beach, why not take a plunge, and decide for yourself? n

Diane Cole is a contributing editor at US News & World Report and author of the memoir, “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”

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