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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
I love stories that are just three or four pages long; The Girl on the Fridge has 46, and I loved almost all of them. Keret's stories are funny and sad and at times outrageous. I'll be reading more of his work. Oh, and his film, Jellyfish, is quite wonderful as well.
I mean it was fine, I was expecting a lot more. We read some of his stories in my creative writing class and I really liked them so I decided to pick up one of his books. I liked the stores at the beginning more, and as the book went on it was just dry and I found myself skimming through stories and becoming bored. I felt like some of the stories were extremely dark just for the sake of being extremely dark. I don’t mind some dark and twisted humor but some of them seemed that the only purpose was to be disturbing. I now understand why my teachers selected the stories they did, they picked the best products from a lackluster batch. I do have another one of his book, I might read it, still deciding. Some story’s were amazing and were worth reading but other were just... boring. Was this book translated from another language? If so maybe some stories would make more sense in the original language.
Είχα μια αμφιβολία για το πόσα άστρα να δώσω σε αυτό το βιβλίο μα τελικά αποφάσισα τα 4* γιατί τα διηγήματα μου άρεσαν τόσο πολύ λόγω της παράνοιας που έχουν και της συντομίας τους. Ένας συγγραφέας που γράφει μεγάλη λογοτεχνία με λίγες λέξεις και σίγουρα έχει να δώσει πολλά ακόμη.
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
I found this short short fiction anthology by Israeli hipster author Etgar Keret in a Little Free Library and took it to Cancun over summer vacation, thinking the small bites would be digestible. They were, fairly. Almost uniformly they have one decisive point to make, often on the absurdity of violence, hammered home with a tidy half-twist at the end that erases other possible interpretations. A few were resonant enough to reread and really think about, including the story the collection is named for.
I've really enjoyed several other Keret stories, but I found this collection somehow lacking. There's a viscious creativity at the heart of many of these short shorts (often only a page long), but they lack the arc of a story or a genuine character -- instead, we see a problem, and that's it. I want a little more out of a story -- a single, arresting image is not enough.
I bought this at Powell's in Chicago; my wife drove and I read a few stories aloud -- which isn't problematic as most of them were less than two pages and hilariously dry. I finished before we made it to Lafyette. I would read more of his work but have since grown immune to erratic impulses to flash effect.
A collection of short stories translated from Hebrew. Some were bizarre, some were touching, but I enjoyed pretty much all of them. I wonder how much meaning was lost in translation. This is just something I wonder in general, because as I said, these stories still worked. I have another collection by Keret to read, and I'm eager to see if his style is consistently bizarre and amusing.
Not as good as "Fly Already." Makes you wonder how much is lost in translation.