The Girl on the Fridge
Etgar Keret
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p>A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. <em>The Girl on the Fridge </em>contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.</p>From Publishers Weekly<p>Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (<em>The Nimrod Flipout</em>) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like Nothing, about a woman who loved a man who was made of nothing because this love would never betray her, and Freeze! about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: Not Human Beings, in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in A Bet, when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of Moonlighting, suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. <em>(Apr.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>Review<p>"Keret is a brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. He is the voice of the next generation." —Salman Rushdie</p><p>“Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre- Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer whaling at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat.” —Stephen Marche, <em>The Forward </em></p><p>“Short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren’t—Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously.” —Yann Martel</p><p>“Keret can do more with six . . . paragraphs than most writers can with 600 pages.” —Kyle Smith, <em>People</em></p>