Word: readerly
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...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...
Really? What is that one chance? He offers no specific vision, only this general yet urgent endorsement of unification. But the reader should forgive Mak this halfhearted attempt to pull a foreign-affairs moral from his history lesson. The book is not a call for unity, but a call for peace. It is a testament to Mak's warmth and skill as a writer that even in a chronicle of unrelenting barbarity he has portrayed a humanity worth saving...
...Rice is a passionate reader, to be sure, but her allusion to Jefferson, who wrestled with Barbary pirate attacks on American sailors two centuries ago, may also have been her way of illustrating the intractability of Mideast problems - and of lowering expectations. As she embarked late Friday on a four-day swing across the region, Rice knew very well how little time she had left to work toward the breathtakingly ambitious goal set by President Bush: the creation of a Palestinian state that could live alongside Israel in peace...
Today we cling to the Tudors, Gregory believes, because their moral questions have more obvious answers than ours. "When Henry decides to behead a young woman [his fifth wife, Catherine Howard], it's so obviously a bad thing to do that it's satisfying to the reader," Gregory says. "To judge it gives us comfort and certainty in an uncertain world." Sort of like reading a tabloid. A war may rage on, the stock market may tumble, but things are still O.K. if some sexy young star is behaving more badly than...