Word: keret
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Part of the appeal no doubt rests in the brevity of Keret's surreal snapshots of Israel's intifadeh generations ("Just enough to read between leaving your cell and getting stopped in the showers," is how he puts it). There is also the way that his very short stories - there are 46 in Missing Kissinger, in just 211 pages - lend themselves to lengthy bouts of reflection...
...Keret's real subjects are Israel's teenage soldiers turned unsettled couch potatoes, the 20-something slacker veterans who live in the twin shadows of the Holocaust and their state's martial heritage. For all his imaginative pyrotechnics, Keret's aim is engage his reader with the everyday oddness of Israel. "I would call it subjective realism," he says of his bizarre storylines. "I am trying to show things the way they feel." Overwhelmingly, in Keret's fiction, things feel edgy. Throughout Missing Kissinger, there is the sense of the dark slap-shtick of a country where, through dumb luck...
...literary model, Keret explains from his home in Tel Aviv, it is Franz Kafka. "Kafka tries to reach his moral goal by disorientating the reader," he says. "A short story in this style is like a slap in the face." If Kafka offers a slap, Keret's stories are more like a rifle-butt blow to the jaw. In one tale, the protagonist spots a woman walking down the street and sees, a second later, "the tip of a knife sticking out of the front of her neck...
...quick-fix fiction has won Keret plaudits and fame. Missing Kissinger, his breakthrough book, came out in 1994 (published in the U.K. and the U.S. this March, most of the stories here appear for the first time in English). It was chosen as one of the 50 most important works in Hebrew by the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and is on the Israeli high school syllabus. Keret now pens caustic satirical sketches for Israeli TV, has published a series of comic books and won Israel's equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar for Skin Deep, a movie he co-directed...
...human fallout of the Knesset's political posturing is an incessant background hum. In a way that sneaks up on them, several of the book's characters have their lives eaten away by their army experiences. The deadbeat heroes elicit a dead-pan wit. "He had no future," Keret writes of one of his leading men. "He didn't even have a near present...