Few times the short narrative achieves the supposed greatest value of the novel or essay as emblematic works of the writer with trade. That is why the case of etgar keret It is that of the writer of stories and stories who finds in them the highest degree of narrative realization.
More than anything because surely this Israeli writer knows that it certainly is. His literature is fully realized in small worlds that implode into the deepest questions.
Perhaps cut may be an antecedent, because even its supposed novels are fragmented as stories. The point is that without reaching that absolute domain of language, meaning, image and symbol that the Argentine genius embodied.
So, loas apart it never hurts to get lost in volumes of stories like those offered by Keret, where new worlds are fragmented towards the comic and the tragic, from the surreal at times, but always from that deep estrangement of the great writer capable of recomposing reality for us to fully enjoy new focuses as perceptions never seen before.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Etgar Keret
The seven years of plenty
One of those books in which the author exposes himself as ecce homo to particular readers and to the world by extension. In Keret's case, it is again through stories that mark distant spaces. And at times a lyrical existentialism rules, while at other times the most fascinating literary notions about love, loss or uprooting set the pace.
Confession compiled during the days of a life over seven years and later broken down into stories. Everyday life and exceptionality because discovering the deep layer of humanism extended as fresh literature is one of those existential adventures for readers with exquisite palates. For seven years Etgar Keret has kept records of his personal life, from the birth of his son to the death of his father.
The result is these tragicomic chronicles that go far beyond the history of his family and his career. And it is that with an ultra-Orthodox sister who has eleven children and eight grandchildren, a pacifist brother in favor of the legalization of marijuana and some Holocaust surviving parents, her personal history seems to contain the history of the entire Israeli society.
And when their arrival at the hospital for the imminent birth of your child coincides with that of the victims of a suicide attack; when his conversations with other parents of three-year-olds involve questions like "Will your son join the army when he's eighteen?" and his old school friend's biggest fear is that his model of the Eiffel Tower made of matches is destroyed by Scud missiles, the personal and the national are difficult to distinguish.
Suddenly there is a knock on the door
They could range from Jehovah's Witnesses to an expected certified letter, when the certified letters announced more than just fines. The point is that this sudden knocking on the door is the splitting of a story, the parenthesis of what is going to happen between the general that happens. That's where good stories are born, in that unforeseen event that augurs a change.
Tell me a story or I'll kill you. Tell me a story or I'll die. This is how the new collection of stories by Etgar Keret begins: with a threat to quench our thirst for stories and to cope with the day to day in this crazy world, in which heads and tails continually face each other, as in a Möbius band .
In the 38 stories of Suddenly a knock at the door, there are many useful exercises to learn to understand another life, loneliness, death, violence and the stock market index. Full of absurd situations, humor, sadness and compassion, this collection by Etgar Keret, described as a "genius" by the New York Times, confirms him as one of the most original writers of his generation.
Kamikaze pizzeria and other stories
The absurd ends up explaining everything perfectly, without leaving a single loose end. As Heine would say, "true madness may be nothing other than wisdom itself, which, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has made the intelligent decision to go mad."
The characters in this volume are entirely convinced or firmly determined to comply with the script of nonsense as the only way out for so many impossible life scenarios. The reader will be shaken by a fresh, daring, ironic and surprising language, in the mouth of a barrage of characters. which, in a constant coming and going, cause shocking and funny situations, as well as touchingly tragic ones.
We will meet a bus driver who wanted to be God, with Ana, the owner of a grocery store located at the gates of Hell, with Haim and his world of suicide bombers, which looks so much like the world of the living ... All these beings are they move between the crudest reality and the craziest fiction, which ends up being mixed in a single reality of unrealities.