Product Description

Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. Hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Heret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain - from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13555 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781592641055
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories stings and thrills with fierce fables of modern life. Set in landscapes ranging from "this armpit town outside Austin, Texas" to "this village in Uzbekistan that was built right smack at the mouth of Hell," these stories lay their plots' central tensions out plainly: "Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll," one begins. Then they take off like little roller coasters, careening through the pathos of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the clowning of David Sedaris's Barrel Fever, the in-your-face violence of Quentin Tarantino, and the bewildered alienation of Franz Kafka. But readers need not know any of Keret's sources to enjoy his stories fully. The Israeli writer's aphorisms leap off the page and lodge themselves in the mind: "There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed." Keret's vernacular prose is fun to read, and his vision of the world is weirdly comforting. Happiness never really flourishes, but small hopes and graces abound. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly
In this collection of antic tales, Israeli writer Keret chronicles the bitter ironies that determine his characters' daily lives. Set in contemporary Israel, Keret's brief stories most are three to five pages long juxtapose a casual realism with regular flashes of unabashed absurdity, portraying characters on the brink of adulthood forced to confront life's chaotic forces death, justice, love, betrayal for the first time. Keret attempts to render often sad or tragic events with a light touch, and his plots lend a fantastical, whimsical air to simple, everyday reality: a bus driver is obsessed with keeping his schedule, a stewardess falls in love with a passenger, a man is befriended by an angel in disguise, a woman runs a convenience store at the gate to hell. The most successful stories capitalize on their brevity, their irony sharpening as the plot turns on a dime. "Cocked and Locked," for instance, portrays an Israeli and an Arab soldier in a desert standoff; a clever switch of identity reveals that the enemies we create are often born inside ourselves. But Keret's characters can be carelessly drawn, their shifts in sentiment seeming either flip or predictable, as in the story "Good Intentions," which focuses on a coldhearted killer's decision not to murder a good man. Similarly, the longest story, "Kneller's Happy Campers," which follows a young man on a quest for love in the afterlife, seems disjointed and bland after the charms of its conceit wear off. Without strong individuals, the stories here lose critical mass and remain too disparate to command attention as a collection.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Israeli writer Keret's stories are brief and powerful linguistic downpours, usually punctuated by uproarious climaxes. One of the best tells of a girl who requires her boyfriend to rip out his mother's heart to prove his love. This is wonderful political satire, but even taken at face value, its last line is hilarious. "There are two kinds of people," Keret says, "the ones who like to sleep next to the wall, and the ones who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed." The final story, "Kneller's Happy Campers," imagines the afterlife of suicides, in which people walk around after offing themselves in a world slightly more awful than the one they left; this is Twain's "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" turned upside down, and it's almost as funny. Keret gives in to stereotypes when he turns his eye toward Americans or Palestinians, but readers will still find those stories, like the others, smart, insightful, and delightfully hip. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Great Short Fiction from Israel
Although wildly popular in his native Israel, this collection is the first of Keret's work to be published in the US. Two-thirds of the small book is given over to 22 equally small short stories, all ranging from 5-8 pages or so. These stories are difficult to characterize, although they generally feature alienated males (often children or teenagers), and the writing is universally deft and satirically witty with an underlying tone of irony and sorrow-occasionally drifting into unreality. Any description of them would not do them justice at all. I don't read enough American writers to think up a good comparison, although I would say Kerst shares some of Jonathan Lethem and Mark Jude Porier's territory. However, what the stories more similar to is some of the short fiction that came out of Scotland in the early to mid-'90s from people like Gordon Legge, Duncan McLean, and James Kelman, who also write very brief stories. Perhaps most of all, the book bears comparison to the absurdist fables of another Scot, Magnus Mills (All Quiet on the Orient Express, The Restraint of Beasts, Three To See The King). The novella which occupies the final third of the book, "Kneller's Happy Campers", about the afterlife of those who commit suicide, is especially redolent of Mills' odd and affecting mix of black humor and fantasy. The collection is drawn and translated from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, and one can only hope that more makes it into English and across the shores.

thoughtful and original.
Etgar Keret takes the term "short story" very literally. The majority of the stories don't exceed four pages. Keret doesn't engage in excessive prose, he doesn't devote much energy to setting a scene. He punches you on the nose with a story, then runs away. In the hands of any other author, this technique could be problematic: It doesn't allow the reader to truly know or care about his characters, and the only atmosphere present is the brevity of Keret's style. But it works because he is a very skilled storyteller, more concerned with walloping the reader over the head with a message and a purpose than taking the time to pull you into another world. Each story is a fable, a fairy tale. The short length and lack of detail can prove to be misleading--these are very complicated, well-thought out stories. They don't take long to read, but it does require time and brain-power to comprehend them.

A few stories fall flat. "Uterus," for instance. Sometimes I got the impression that something was lost in translation. But "The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God: & Other Stories" is a very satisfying collection, meaty in ideas if not physical heft.

Keretian
A writer this original deserves an adjective of his own, for Keret's style is indeed unique. A true sign of literary genius, for me, is unpredictability. Every sentence in Keret's writing comes as a surprise -- and yet, at the same time, could not have been anything else. Keret deserves the attention he is finally receiving outside Israel.