Etgar Keret’s short stories are the literary equivalent of a slap across the face. The action is over in a heartbeat and the details are quickly forgotten, but the sting remains.
Already an Israeli sensation, Keret is making his book-length English-translation debut with The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories. This slim volume contains almost two-dozen short (and I do mean short) stories, plus a quickie novella.
Keret’s work grapples with questions of mortality, cast in the shadow of love. The book’s cover illustration of a happy-faced cartoon man blowing his brains out typifies Keret’s approach: grim, ironic, and bizarrely charming. His characters all seem to be halfway to death in one way or another, or just past it and looking back.
In the novella, “Kneller’s Happy Campers” a handful of characters who committed suicide take a road trip through a not-so-dreary afterlife. Their leader, a youngish guy named Mordy, is in hot pursuit of his old girlfriend, who “offed” about a month after he did. On the way, he and his buddy Uzi see the sites, get some ice cream, and pick up a hitchhiker. (She is a “Juliet,” a woman who committed suicide with poison or pills, and hence bears no ugly post-death deformities.) The group winds up at a quasi-religious commune where Mordy straightens out his afterworld love life, but not before the unthinkable occurs: someone kills himself a second time, but only in the name of achieving a higher consciousness.
Talking dogs that eat gyros. A boy who loves his piggy bank like a living pet. Angels who are lying bastards. Keret seems to delight in his invented mayhem. But there are also essential truths buried in the head-scratching weirdness. Keret deals in real human trauma, such as nagging loneliness and the search for identity.
In the story “Pipes,” the protagonist struggles through his earthly existence as a dispirited oddball, only to escape to heaven through an elaborately constructed pipe. On the other side he discovers many others who like him, “were genuinely unable to be happy on Earth.” Heaven, in short, is a safe harbor not for the perfect, but for the strange.
Many of Keret’s characters manage to survive only by escaping the natural world. They must do this, the author seems to imply, because life on Earth is riddled with dueling desires too complex to be reconciled. The need for affection competes with the need for solitude. There is happiness, but there is always the suspicion that evil is brewing just beneath the surface. And then there is the tricky matter of love, which none of Keret’s quirky characters can get quite right.
In “Missing Kissinger,” the narrator-protagonist is out to prove himself to his girlfriend, Miri. “She says I don’t really love her,” the narrator says. “That I say I do, and I think I do, but I don’t…What can I tell her? If I yell at her to not be so stupid and to stop fucking with my head, she’ll only take it as proof.” Keret’s characters are as psychotic as they are honest. At Miri’s suggestion, the narrator proves his love by cutting out his own mother’s heart.
If there is one thing that distinguishes Keret’s style, it is the brevity of nearly all of his stories, which are usually no more than than five pages apiece. The shortness is sometimes a shortcoming. Because so little time is devoted to plot and character development, the nuances of the stories can quickly fade from memory.
The strength of Keret’s style, however, is its simplicity. He frequently transforms short, plain observations into highly ironic commentary by writing from the point of view of children or teenagers. At a time in life when it makes sense to view the world with equal parts wonder and apprehension, his younger characters struggle to make sense of adult words and warnings.
In “Shoes,” one of the book’s two stories that begin on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the young protagonist is told on a school field trip that “Every time you see German products, whether it’s a television set or anything else, you should always remember that underneath the fancy wrapping there are parts and tubes made out of the bones and skin and flesh of dead Jews.” The boy, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, of course believes this. Later, when his mother returns from a trip abroad with a pair of German sneakers for her son, he faces a moral conundrum: Does wearing the shoes and enjoying their fine German craftsmanship make him a pint-sized Nazi? Ultimately, the boy accepts that his grandpa is somewhere in the fabric of his sneakers, and he enjoys a stellar game of soccer, content with this revelation.
Keret, who is a prolific author of Israeli screenplays as well as fiction, is himself the child of Holocaust survivors. His stories draw heavily upon Israeli culture, including relations with Arabs and military life, as well as the recurring questions of family and faith faced by Jews across the religious spectrum. Not all of his stories end happily, and many are downright depressing. But they all incorporate a sort of uplifting sweetness that flows directly from Keret’s willingness to see the world upside down, and just as it is.
