A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.
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From Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Keret is a brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. He is the voice of the next generation." —Salman Rushdie
“Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre- Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer whaling at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat.” —Stephen Marche, The Forward
“Short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren’t—Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously.” —Yann Martel
“Keret can do more with six . . . paragraphs than most writers can with 600 pages.” —Kyle Smith, People
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4.0 out of 5 stars
13 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant, effective, topical, and raw
May 21 2008
By Dean McRobie
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
A great friend of mine loaned me this book saying is changed her. It had an amazing effect on me too. The book is written in very short stories, no more than a page or three at most. Each story is complete, explores an idea, an event, often with an unexpected component, not really a twist, just unexpected. The book is just the essence of stories. It's like a great red wine reduction ... flavorful, deep in color, hints of what could be a much bigger wine, but concentrated to accent your current mood.I think the first two stories: asthma and the marriage story stuck with me the most. The line in the first story goes something like this:
"When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."
"When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Uneven, but mostly good
May 23 2008
By James E. McVoy
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
This collection of short stories is very uneven in quality. The weak ones seem merely flippant, the strong ones remind me of prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire. My first impression after reading a couple of the stories was mostly negative. Upon finishing the book, I realized the power and beauty of the best ones greatly outweigh the flimsiness of the weak. Definitely worth reading.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
not happy but fun stories
Aug 30 2008
By J. Demske
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Keret's stories are rarely happy, but they're fun. Their fluidity and lack of surface complications, plus the casual bits of surrealism, make them different in the best kind of way: they are different because of a unique simplicity, not because of a fatal dose of complexity and effort. The stories in "The Girl on the Fridge" aren't perfect, yet there are a handful that make the book well worth reading.
I look forward to reading Keret's other books.
I look forward to reading Keret's other books.
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