Etgar Keret

[Stewart]

Etgar Keret (born August 20, 1967) is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels and scriptwriting for film and television.

Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and their son, Lev. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv University.

Keret's first published work was Tzinorot (Pipelines, 1992), a collection of short stories which was generally ignored. In 1993 he won the first prize in the Alternative Theater Festival in Akko for Entebbe: A Musical which he wrote with Jonathan Bar Giora. His second book, Ga'aguai Le'Kissinger (Missing Kissinger, 1994), a collection of fifty very short stories, caught the attention of the general public. His short story "Siren", which deals with the paradoxes of modern Israeli society, is included in the curriculum for the Israeli bagrut examination in literature.

Keret has co-authored several comic books, among them Lo Banu Lehenot (Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun, 1996) with Rutu Modan and Simtaot Hazaam (Streets of Fury, 1997) with Asaf Hanuka. In 1999 five of his stories were translated into English, and adapted into "graphic novellas" under the joint title Jetlag. The illustrators were the five members of the Actus Tragicus collective.

In 1998 Keret published Ha'Keytana Shel Kneller (Kneller's Happy Campers), a collection of short stories. The title story, the longest in the collection, follows a young man who commits suicide and goes on a quest for love in the afterlife. It appears in the English language collection of Keret's stories The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories (2004) and was also adapted into the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze (2006), with illustrations by Asaf Hanuka. The story was also adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film called Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits and Will Arnett. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Keret's latest short story collection in Hebrew is Anihu (I-am-him, 2002).

Keret also wrote a children's book Dad Runs Away with the Circus (2004), illustrated by Rutu Modan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY



The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (2004)
The Nimrod Flipout (2006)
The Girl On The Fridge (2008)

RELATED LINKS


Etgar Keret on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etgar_Keret)
Etgar Keret Official Site (http://www.etgarkeret.com/)

[Stewart]

No experience with him myself, but I've noticed a few mentions of him, here and elsewhere, and thought we should get a thread up for him. So this is it!

[Eric]

I posted this on another thread, but might as well do so here too:



I was really put off Keret last night. I thought I'd have a break from my Estonian, Finnish, Dutch, etc., stuff and read something light and short.

Light, but also lightweight. Pizzeria Kamikaze.

The novella, split up into two-page chapters, has a good basic idea: describing the lives of dead people who have committed suicide in a kind of heaven / hell / limbo resembling modern Israel. The protagonist has to get a job. Why, we are never told.

The major problem is that Keret uses this literary device or framework to tell fairly pointless and banal tales about young people sitting in bars and pizzerias, living in rooms, and doing all the things that young people do all the time. And he only remembers his death framework now and again, throws in a bit of fun stuff about the small bullet hole where the bullet entered the suicide's head, the bigger one where the dum-dum left. I think a dum-dum would have removed the whole head, but what do I know, never been in the army.

So we've got a bit of death, a bit of suicide, and a lot of more-or-less realist student life in the 1990s. Not my glass of ginger ale.


I suppose I'm just simply too old for empathising with student life. All the snooker and frozen yogurt is surely for another generation than mine.

[Daniel del Real]

Yesterday, a little tired of complicating my mind with gloomy Eeastern European novels and the history of Islam and its consequences to modern world I decided to take off the shelf the latest title of short stories by Etgar Keret called The Man Without a Head. Excellent choice to get rid of all the complications and take a breath of fresh air with agile prose of very short pieces of fiction (most of them 2 or 3 pages long). What all these stories have in common is that there is always a detonator with the surreal, something that goes beyond the possibilities of the real world. Characters have to go along with it, creating very interesting and funny situations, and most of the time, adapting this irregularities to their life as of this would be very normal. Hard to stop because I had to sleep, but right now, I think this is the kind of book I need to read.

[pesahson]

Is that Keret's latest book or some sort of collection of various short stories from previous years? There is a new book of his coming out in English in February titled Suddenly, a knock on the door, I'm wondering whether it's the same collection. I've read a couple of his books, some in Polish and some in English, but probably we haven't read the same stuff. I agree that his prose is quite refreshing. Some of his stories are surreal, some go over my head completely, but when I like his stories I really like them. He has an ability to capture emotions through images or situations that he depicts. Not to mention his wonderful sense of humour. Breaking the Pig, Pavements, A Good Looking Couple, Shoes are among my favorite stories.

If you want to explore Keret more, he made a movie with his wife – The Jellyfish. Also, there is a movie based on Kneller’s Happy Campers titled Wristcutters: A Love Story.

[Daniel del Real]

There is always this problems with short stories and poetry. Publishing groups decide how to regroup the content and then choose a random name for which they think it will sell best. None of the titles you mentioned exists with that name in the Spanish translations and I just can't read Hebrew so I can at least guess which one belongs to each one, to decide which language is closer to reality, Spanish or English. The book I just read is the latest he has published in Spanish, at it was released last year, so I don't think it's a compilation of previous works.
I'll try to pick more of his works, for sure.

[Eric]

Daniel makes and important point. Publishers often regroup stories and then issue them, with maybe a few added or deleted, under another title. And collections between languages vary too in scope.

I wrote here a while back (in 2008) that I didn't get on very well with Etgar Keret's stories. Imagine if I wanted to give him another chance. If I was expecting a book of completely different stories and found I had bought the same stories with either the book or the stories under different titles, I think I would give up in disgust. It is as if the publisher is trying to trick people into buying the same "product" twice.

But I have not read anything of his since 2008. So it's hard to know whether we've been reading the same stuff as you have in Spanish, Polish and English.