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Written by ASAP
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Wednesday, 24 May 2006 |
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 If Etgar Keret were writing this article, he wouldn’t begin by explaining that he’s an acclaimed Israeli short story writer. He wouldn’t describe his surreal, hilarious, poignant stories using any of those adjectives.
If Keret wrote about the conversation we recently had at his midtown hotel, he might instead quote the chair he was leaning back in, or the unmade bed across the room. He might turn the reporter into a busy little ant, unable to ask long questions about the writing process. Or he might not mention the interview at all and instead write up a story his friend told him about his cousin’s affair — with a dog.
Etgar Keret’s strange stories, which are sometimes one-page long and rarely more than five, fall somewhere between jokes and fables. A girlfriend transforms into a hairy, fat man at night. The tallest kid in his class grows so big he slips his parents into his shirt pocket. The television set narrates its owner’s one-night stand.
In his stories, he says, “You just kind of have metaphors moving around, bouncing and punching each other.”
The stories in his new collection, “The Nimrod Flip Out,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) feature young men adrift in their own lives, unsure of who they are and unable to understand their circumstances — which usually tend toward the bizarre.
The stories cover similar territory to angsty rock songs and slacker movies starring stubbly actors: the difficulty of finding a girlfriend, the trouble if you do, the drudgery of work, the peculiar nature of the male friendship. But Keret doesn’t bother with pages of prose painstakingly bringing a world to life. He’s not interested in verisimilitude — he hopes to surprise you with jarring images that are funny, and uncomfortably resonant.
“When I write a story, my prime objective is to find out what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s like surfing and you wait for the wave to come. You really can’t tell the wave where to go — the best you can do is keep your balance, but you really don’t control the direction of the story.”
Keret prefers to leave his readers scratching their heads, and, hopefully, laughing. Although most of his stories take place in Israel, where politics can’t be escaped, his fiction doesn’t grapple with political questions. “When I wake up in the morning, my first thought is ‘Why doesn’t my wife love me anymore, I hope they didn’t steal my car.’ It’s not like ‘I wish the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be done,’” he said. “Your life is in the foreground.”
He doesn’t like tidy endings with lessons learned and wisdom imparted, so he cuts off the beginning and the ending of most of his stories.
“It’s much more representative of life because usually life doesn’t have this kind of ending point,” he said. | Only registered users can write comments.
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