How to describe the Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s stories? Sci-fi scenarios, vignettes, thought experiments, fables, parables? They do not have plots so much as premises from which consequences, extrapolations and ironic complications stem.
Unfortunately, the joy of these pieces makes them resistant to reviewing. You have to tell not show their ingenuity. For example, the opening piece, ‘A World Without Selfie-Sticks’, starts with the conceit of a man yelling at a woman who is the spit of his former partner. But it turns out she really did emigrate to Australia and this woman is her doppelgänger from a parallel universe. Not-Debbie is taking part in Vive la Différence, a gameshow where the contestant has to discover the absent element from our reality. The prize, apart from riches, is to get back, though the losers are stranded – making the story part Oz and part ‘Little Mermaid’. The answer to what is missing from our universe is retrospectively obvious in a deeply satisfying and melancholy way.
Absurdity is crucial to how Keret’s fictions work. Often the technologies or alterations go beyond what actually is. There is a wry disappointment in time travel being used for weight loss or a Loneliness Studies department creating artificial soulmates. Even the more obvious stories are heightened by a pervasive sadness.
Keret is similar to writers such as Shalom Auslander and Gary Shteyngart, although Shteyngart is more sombrely manic (even in his restrained new novel Vera, or Faith) and Auslander more uncompromising and caustic. What Keret has instead is Weltschmerz. When he does deal with Arab-Israeli relations straight on – as in ‘A Dog for a Dog’ – it is with a nauseated incomprehension.
The title story has a counter-piece, ‘Undo’, where it becomes possible for people to use CTRL-Z on the artificial reality they now wholly inhabit. It is commendable that Keret can take broadly the same theme and play it in different keys. The last lines show that, despite having the structures of jokes, Keret’s stories are hauntingly re-readable:
Thirty seconds without screwing up, that’s all it’ll take to lift the curse. Thirty seconds without hurting, without disappointing, without causing pain to another. Thirty whole seconds. Good luck to us all.
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