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A review by peelspls
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories by Etgar Keret
3.0
A collection of touching and somewhat absurdist tales. The narrators almost always seem to converge to be cynical young men with older brothers, to enjoy provoking the system, to be ethically and morally dubious people and speak in sentences long enough to make an actual human breathless. (see what I did there?)
They negotiate difficult ethical and moral circumstances but they almost always seem to converge to the same point. Some of the stories felt like they had many interesting concepts forced into a few pages, which felt incomplete rather than letting the themes breathe. The author definitely has characters with strong voices and personalities but they all end up sounding really similar to each other, and therefore almost predictable.
Many stories explore the concept of the Afterlife, particularly how it could hold meaning in it's various mundane manifestations. Almost all of the women who are written about are either very dutiful or very demanding or very attractive, and sometimes all of the above to the narrator-protagonist. They are rarely explored emotionally, as in the case of Leehee and Desiree in the novella.
They negotiate difficult ethical and moral circumstances but they almost always seem to converge to the same point. Some of the stories felt like they had many interesting concepts forced into a few pages, which felt incomplete rather than letting the themes breathe. The author definitely has characters with strong voices and personalities but they all end up sounding really similar to each other, and therefore almost predictable.
Many stories explore the concept of the Afterlife, particularly how it could hold meaning in it's various mundane manifestations. Almost all of the women who are written about are either very dutiful or very demanding or very attractive, and sometimes all of the above to the narrator-protagonist. They are rarely explored emotionally, as in the case of Leehee and Desiree in the novella.