Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Keret, E. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Bringing up a child, lying to the boss, placing an order in a fast-food restaurant: in Etgar Keret's new collection, daily life is complicated, dangerous, and full of yearning. In his most playful and most mature work yet, the living and the dead, silent children and talking animals, dreams and waking life coexist in an uneasy world. Overflowing with absurdity, humor, sadness, and compassion, the tales in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door establish Etgar Keret--declared a "genius" by The New York Times --as one of the most original writers of his generation.
Author Notes
Etgar Keret was born on August 20, 1967 in Israel. He is an Israeli-Polish writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, and at Tel Aviv University. Keret's first published work was Pipelines, a collection of short stories. His second book, Missing Kissinger, a collection of fifty very short stories, caught the attention of the general public. He has also co-authored several comic books, among them Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun with Rutu Modan and Streets of Fury with Asaf Hanuka. In 1998, Keret published Kneller's Happy Campers, He also wrote a children's book Dad Runs Away with the Circus. In 2016 his title The Seven Good Years made the New Zealand Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An all-star roster of narrators masterfully performs the audio edition of Keret's latest collection, which mixes humor, emotion, absurdity, morality, and humility. Each story in the collection brings a new narrator, including Robert Wisdom, Ira Glass, Miranda July, Ben Marcus, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, John Sayles, Stanley Tucci, and Willem Dafoe-just to name a select few. The varied stories offer skewed points of view on such everyday activities as ordering food, having coffee with a potential employer, and raising children. The result is a truly inspired series of performances and an utterly entertaining audiobook. Listening quickly becomes a compulsion. An FSG paperback. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMERICANS have developed a peculiar reverence for the concept of "reality." We use the term to legitimize all manner of sleazy entertainment, and to judge our political leaders, whose capacity for being "real" is apparently measured by their willingness to drink beer with us. Of course, this bias has long informed our literary tradition, in which realism signifies authenticity and adulthood, the normative and hallowed province of James, Hemingway and Carver. Depart from it at your peril, ink-stained wretches, for a conveniently labeled ghetto awaits you - experimental, fabulist, surreal - all terms that signify, in the popular imagination anyway, artifice, obscurity and a kind of childish indulgence. How exhilarating then to encounter "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door," the new collection from Etgar Keret. An award-winning filmmaker, Keret is also one of Israel's best-selling authors, a status he earned in a manner that would be downright heretical here: by writing extremely short, fantastical stories. Worse yet, they are frequently funny. Were he living in Brooklyn, Keret would have been hogtied by a pack of rabid agents and ordered to drop the shtick and write a novel already. Which is not to say that he has escaped the burdens of celebrity. Consider the ingenious title story, in which three armed men hold a writer named Keret hostage and demand he tell them a story. Keret (the character) offers up a nervous description of his plight. "That's not a story," one of his assailants protests. "That's an eyewitness report. It's exactly what's happening here right now. Exactly what we're trying to run away from. Don't you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck. Use your imagination, man, create, invent, take it all the way." It's a pep talk worthy of Beckett, and typical of Keret's narrative M.O.: a sly retreat from reality that in fact marks a determined advance on the private fears and wishes of his characters. What writer, after all, hasn't cowered before the glare of the empty page while also fantasizing, perversely, about a world in which his inventions are worth killing for? For Keret, the creative impulse resides not in a conscious devotion to the classic armature of fiction (character, plot, theme, etc.) but in an allegiance to the anarchic instigations of the subconscious. His best stories display a kind of irrepressible dream logic. A man left by his wife is continually mistaken for other people, and goes along with it, engaging in a series of urgent colloquies that jolt him from his depression. A stoic restaurateur who refuses to sit shiva for her late husband is descended upon by a mob of customers whose voracious appetites awaken her grief. A hit man facing execution brags of his sadistic excess only to be reincarnated as Winnie the Pooh. Reduced to their outlines, plots like these can sound gimmicky. But Keret alights upon protagonists in the midst of psychic upheaval, willing to embrace the bizarre twists that deliver them to their appointed grace or ruin. The humor in their travails arises not from an effort to charm the reader but to confront the darkness that shadows our human folly. So yes, we do meet a talking goldfish whose patter calls to mind Don Rickles, but the fish remains helpless to quell the crushing loneliness of its owner. Keret's previous collections have showcased a dazzling cross section of discombobulated heroes: miserable army conscripts, troubled magicians, vexed immigrants, libidinous monkeys. But there was sometimes a sense that he was using his imaginative gifts as a dodge, leapfrogging from one clever conceit to the next without much emotional investment in his people. These new stories feel more mature, especially when Keret is probing the tender intricacies of family life. He's long been expert at capturing the whims and anxieties of children. He does so here, though, in a stark literal style that represents the most radical departure from his earlier work. "The Polite Little Boy" offers an unflinching portrait of an imploding marriage from the perspective of a kid caught in the middle: "The mother got up and slapped the father as hard as she could. It was strange, because it looked as if this slap only made the father happy, and it was actually the mother who started crying." In "Teamwork," an aggrieved divorcé devises a brutal plan to punish his son's negligent baby sitter, who happens to be his ex-wife's mother. The cycle of paternal panic and capitulation presented in "Big Blue Bus" will haunt any father who has resorted to cartoons to pacify his child - which is to say all of us. As a stylist, Keret specializes in unadorned, mostly expository prose. He writes to ensure narrative momentum, not to distract the reader with figurative language. This has the fortunate effect of rendering his lyric flights that much more striking. "She gets swallowed up by these waves of convulsions, involuntary ones, from deep inside," one of his lovesick heroes reports. "They rumble their way into her neck and tickle the soles of her feet. It's like her whole anatomy is trying to say thanks without knowing how." (Worth mentioning is that Keret's regular translators, Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston, are joined this time around by the American story writer Nathan Englander, a longtime fan.) KERET, born in 1967, has often been distinguished from Israeli writers of the previous generation by virtue of his whimsy. But his concerns are different, as well. While Amos Oz and David Grossman wrestle with the moral quandaries of the emergent Jewish state, and Aharon Appelfeld plumbs the calamitous dislocations of Jewish history, Keret tracks the chaotic inner life of his countrymen. To him, the perils of modern Israel - the free-floating rage, the anguish of occupation, the sudden and senseless violence - are not national dramas so much as existential dilemmas. Of course, the occupational hazard of writing as Keret does is that several of the nearly three dozen stories here come off as half-finished thought experiments. Others lurch toward sentiment at the end. Keret has a tendency to meander when given too much room and not enough premise. He's most effective when he strips away the constraints of realism and gives rein to his subversive imagination. In "Unzipping," a woman named Ella finds a small zipper under her lover's tongue as he lies sleeping. When she pulls it, her lover opens up "like an oyster," revealing a second man. Ella soon realizes she has a zipper under her tongue as well, and the story ends with her fingering it uncertainly, trying "to imagine what she'd be like inside," It's an eerie meditation on the instability of identity, and spans all of five paragraphs. In gems like this, Keret evinces what the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim called "the uses of enchantment," an ability to compel readers to experience their hidden terrors by means of symbolic narrative. Bettelheim used the term to describe fairy tales. It's a testament to Keret's unorthodox gifts that his dark evocations read with the same disarming allure. 'Use your imagination, man,' one of Keret's characters exhorts. 'Create, invent, take it all the way.'
Library Journal Review
From Israeli author Keret (The Nimrod Flipout), these stories take the world by storm and by stealth, in equal parts and everything in between. The title piece is a Three Stooges-like approach to the absurdities of writing; belligerent strangers are continually knocking on the writer's door demanding stories. In "Lieland," the author sets up a moral conundrum of a universe where the lies we tell are made real, while "What of this Goldfish Would You Wish" examines life through the lens of a wish-granting goldfish. "Polite Little Boy" is achingly direct, while "The Story" and "Victorious parts I and II" sassily advocate for themselves with the reader. The stories range from comic to droll to a nether state of complex poignancy; Keret's irreverent, unfettered imagination is truly stunning as he gives voice with equal aplomb to hemorrhoids and guavas while maintaining a wicked edge by wavering to extremes. VERDICT Story meets aphorism meets Zen koan with a liberal dose of humor and a blindingly sharp grasp of the impossible possibilities of the human condition. Art truly fashioned from words; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/23/11.]-Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.