Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

February 13, 2012
In this slim volume of flash fiction and short stories, Israeli author/filmmaker Keret (The Nimrod Flipout; the film Jellyfish) writes with alternating Singeresque magical realism and Kafkaesque absurdity, to mixed effect. Bookended by cautionary tales of writers at work—the title story and “What Animal Are You?”—this collection often takes characters beyond their comfort zones into scenarios of twisted reality. In “Ari,” a man suspects that everyone named Ari is after him. In “Bad Karma,” an insurance salesman tries to recover from being struck by the body of a suicidal jumper. In the longest and most satisfying story, “Surprise Party,” three strangers are the only guests at a celebration from which the guest of honor is strangely absent, and then they help the man’s wife search for him, concerned that he may have suicidal or homicidal tendencies. Many of Keret’s stories are literary doodles; others seem to be concepts in search of a few good characters. Readers tuned in to the author’s narrow-band broadcast will be pleased. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander, on behalf of Nilli Cohen at the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.

March 15, 2012
Stories about storytelling from a young Israeli author. With stories this short (many are a paragraph or two or a page or two, making the 22 pages of the penultimate "Surprise Party" feel like an epic), every word counts, so it's quite possible that something has been lost in the translation (with no slight intended to the three translators credited, including noted author Nathan Englander). However these stories might read differently in Hebrew, and signify something different within a different cultural context, they function like fables and parables, fairy tales and jokes, with goldfish that grant wishes, parallel universes, an insurance agent who suffers (and then prospers) from his own lack of insurance, a woman who mourns her miscarriage with a creative-writing course (with her husband becoming jealous of the instructor and responding by writing his own revelatory stories). Bookending the collection are two stories featuring a writer as protagonist, a first-person narrator that the reader is invited to identify as the author, who is being forced to perform the act of writing for the benefit of others. The first, the title story, finds him coerced to create at gunpoint, conjuring a plot that proceeds to transpire within the story as he takes some pleasure from "creating something out of something." The final story, "What Animal Are You?," shows the self-conscious writer being filmed for a TV feature as he's in the process of writing (or at least simulating it), wondering whether a hooker might seem more natural on camera as his wife than his wife does. His pieces elicit comparison to sources as diverse as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen. He also recalls Lydia Davis in his compression and Donald Barthelme in his whimsy. Yet the stories are hit-and-miss, some of them slight or obvious, though the suggestion that "in the end, everyone gets the Hell or the Heaven he deserves" might be a fantasy that readers will wish were true. More like bits and sketches than stories, from a writer who is often very funny and inventive, and occasionally profound.

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October 15, 2011

Israeli author Keret writes sometimes appealingly wacky, sometimes darkly absurdist stories that translate well to America. He's had pieces in Harper's Magazine and the Paris Review and has been featured on NPR. Sophisticated readers should check this out.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2012
Best-selling Israeli short story writer Keret's latest collection of very short short stories begins and ends with tales about writers writing on demand, either at gunpoint or in front of a camera. In between, characters tells stories to get by and succumb to fantasies. A man returns to his childhood home and falls into an alternative realm, where he confronts embodiments of every lie he ever told. An uninsured insurance salesman racks up sales when he tells the tale of how he was struck by a falling man while keeping his blissful memories of being in a coma to himself. Keret riffs brilliantly on the fairy tale about the fish who grants three wishes. A woman discovers a tiny zipper on her boyfriend's tongue; lost luggage leads to a bloody altercation; a woman only takes lovers named Ari. Strangeness abounds. Keret fits so much psychological and social complexity and metaphysical mystery into these quick, wry, jolting, funny, off-handedly fabulist miniatures, they're like literary magic tricks: no matter how closely you read, you can't figure out how he does it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)