In a 2008 interview with the online magazine Words Without Borders, Etgar Keret explained that, “reality is what is in the back of your mind, it’s not what’s right in front of your eyes.” Even though many of the Israeli’s stories take place in his home country, he creates a fictional world, coming out of the hidden crannies of the mind, that sounds a lot like a slightly skewed description of our own neighborhoods and acquaintances. The fiction in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the recent collection of works translated by Nathan Englander, Sondra Silverston, and Miriam Shlesinger, feels particularly global and fantastic: almost all the stories either exist in or jump into a fabulist world of the subconscious, though feel rooted in everyday life.
In the first collection of Keret’s stories translated for an English-speaking audience, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (The Toby Press, 2004), the stories were compiled from four different books published in Israel between 1992 and 2002; as in other books containing English translations of Keret’s stories like The Nimrod Flipout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), the arrangement of The Bus Driver is based not on the author’s creative decisions but simply as a chronological survey of his work (or as a way to market the work as thoroughly as possible). So, if talking about Suddenly as a step forward in Keret’s work feels a bit specious, there is still a discernable evolution in Keret’s thematic focus.
Most of the stories in Bus Driver focus on the particular views and anxieties of Israeli society—most notably men and women coming to terms with their mandatory military service. In Bus Driver we do get “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” a piece that could be termed a novella and was published in Hebrew under its own title together with a few other stories. The tale describes a world that is basically an afterlife for suicides, but even these suicides are people from the Middle East who still worry about crossing into others’ territories, and the tone is not all that different from that of a graphic novel—the experience is highly visual, with strong descriptions of the society at Kneller’s camp, but the language of the story is reluctant to delve into the real depths of human nature.
Suddenly contains the entirety of a 2010 book published in Israel. It has characters of multiple nationalities with whom we can identify simply in their quest to navigate the vicissitudes of reality. Keret’s earlier stories teemed with tension from the Middle East (described as a place predicated towards violence and domination of the human spirit), but in Suddenly he is dealing with more encompassing issues of divorce, death, family, and finances. Here, the 45-year-old, known in his home country as a writer for a popular sketch comedy T.V. series and as a main contributor to a number of films, comics, and graphic novels, displays his most mature and insightful literary work to date.
Keret, married and moving into middle age, has developed a more nuanced understanding of life in general. While, in Bus Driver, he wrote about such charming things as a young boy who, even though he wants to buy a Bart Simpson doll, hesitates to break a piggy bank that has become like a pet (“Breaking the Pig”), in Suddenly Keret’s characters and plotlines play off the serious and ironic in a way that feels more epic; like in the story “Cheesus Christ,” a description of a murder at a fast food restaurant in the United States and its “butterfly effect.”
The collection’s eponymous opening story sets the stage for the thirty-five tales to come. We see a narrator named Etgar describing a predicament in which three burly men invade his home—two holding him at gunpoint, a third using a cleaver—and demand to be entertained with a story. The narrator struggles to be creative under the pressure. In his nervousness all he can do is relay the details of the present situation, to which one gunman grumbles, “That’s an eyewitness report. It’s exactly what’s happening here right now. Exactly what we’re trying to avoid.” His captors essentially ask him to lie, and the narrator fails. The story’s the perfect jumping off point for the collection; a web of fables that mimic reality and emanate from a place deep in the human subconscious.
In Suddenly we get a particular metaphor for conveying the complexities of an adult life; the men, women, and children of his stories continually lie to each other and even more often to themselves, just so that they can survive the cruelties of their fates. For Etgar Keret it seems creating fiction is not all that different from telling a lie.
The strength of Keret’s stories is in his loyalty to nuance—which is, admittedly, a pretty hard concept to illustrate. But Keret exhibits this nuance in the stigma inherent to lying juxtaposed with the joy of storytelling, and this juxtaposition only points to the complexity of our existence—the non-duality of good and evil, of cynicism and hope; a non-duality to which Suddenly attests.
In “Lieland” Keret gives us a character named Robbie who lies so much he is eventually made privy to a secret dimension, where the people and things created through the world’s prevarications reside. In this alternate world, Robbie comes face to face with his lies; he meets a physical manifestation of a bully he once created in order to get out of losing his mother’s milk money and of a sick dog that at one point got him out of trouble at work. The experience ultimately results in Robbie’s realization of his mistakes. This story, by bending our expectations of reality, demonstrates one of the metaphors that make Keret’s stories so successful. If his characters can create believable characters, the author works on a level that cannot help but draw the reader in. Just like a good lie, the fiction is most believable in its precise details.
The truth found in cynicism makes Keret’s writing even more enthralling. In “Lieland,” this tendency toward the negative is an essential aspect in creating a believable lie. As a character experiences, “It was much harder to make up positive lies. At least, if you wanted them to sound plausible. In general, if you tell people something bad, they buy right into it, because it strikes them as normal.” Keret understands that neither a lie nor a story can focus on either struggle or certainty, because reality is comprised of both.
Keret’s characters in Suddenly, though existing in a kind of dream world, often vacillate between morality (the truth) and poor decisions (the lie), so that the reader finishes a story with a strange feeling of melancholy coupled with an epiphany, as if, even though the world is tough and confrontational, at least we are all in it together. We find solace in the sort of world depicted in “Pick a Color,” where a disabled man meets God and discovers that He, too, is disabled, and the man realizes that our suffering can only make us feel blessed. Described in the engaging, colloquial voice of Keret, this world—even though it’s a funny, mixed-up place—contains our only hope for salvation.
By Chris Black
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
