Suddenly, a knock on the door by Etgar Keret. This is another one of those books I came upon by chance at the Brooklyn Public Library. In fact, it was by chance that we came upon this particular branch of the library at all (the Mapleton Branch on 60th Street), returning home after an expedition to a giant freezing warehouse of an Asian supermarket where we went in search of a particular kind of vegetarian duck.
Etgar Keret is a celebrated Israeli short story writer whose work originally appears in Hebrew. He's praised by the likes of Amos Oz and Salman Rushdie, among others. I'd never heard of Keret before accidentally coming upon this book and I've never read Amos Oz. I have read Salman Rushdie, but that isn't why I picked up this book. It was the cover, partially, though I know well enough by now not to judge a book by that criteria; the back cover copy also had something to do with it, though having written cover copy for thousands of books myself for publishers over the years, I know firsthand how unreliable and intentionally misleading that can be, too. What sold me in the end was opening the book at random and finding a story about a man with a hemorrhoid (<—Jesus, what a difficult word this is to spell!!!) that takes over his life.
Now I'm not a fan of hemorrhoids, real or fictional, nor am I anything but an occasional fan of sophomoric literary humor, but I do like very short stories peopled with quirky characters caught in darkly tragicomic absurd situations where literally anything can happen. I find such stories a good way to describe life.
Keret's tales are less short stories in the usual sense than postmodern fables. By "postmodern" I mean they are ambiguous in meaning, have no clear moral or any moral at all in the conventional sense, and very often they even lack a proper ending. They start seeming to be about one thing, wander off in another direction, and finish in mid-air on a tangent. They are conscious of themselves as "stories" and work against the notion that the reader is meant to lose him or herself in the narrative, in the so-called "reality of fiction." They are a comment on storytelling itself and our need for stories as much as anything else.
This may annoy some readers but I'm not one of them. I rather like stories like this. When done well, as most of the stories in this collection are, it's an effective technique for working against expectations and cliche, for capturing something essential about life: specifically, life's resemblance to a story that never really comes together, that doesn't finished tied up in a neat red bow.
When such stories are not done well, as they are sometimes not so well done in this collection, the reader is left with a "ho-hum, meh" feeling, the sense that certain writers live a charmed life, somehow managing to get important people like Salman Rushdie and the book reviewer at The New York Times to read into their work meanings and nuances that may or may not exist, taking the time and making the effort they wouldn't take or make for a hundred other writers no more or less talented than Keret.
Well, that's the way it goes. There's no use railing against the "injustice" of it all. For every Etgar Keret I don't doubt there are fifty thousand other "Etgar Kerets" who labor on right this very moment, scribbling away in obscurity, their life's labor unappreciated, their stories fated never to see the light of day (or the candlelit dark of night), never, in short (if it's not too late already to call this rambling sentence "short," except in relative terms, since I could easily go on), never, I say, to find an appreciative eyeball.
I once got an editor of James Patterson novels to admit what I'd long suspected all along. That an unknown writer could submit to him the exact same manuscript that James Patterson submitted and it would be rejected out of hand instead of rewarded with a million-dollar contract. Having elicited this unforced admission, perhaps it was a confession, I consider to have been, with hardly any exaggeration, the crowning moment in my publishing career and it confirmed everything I'd observed and could ever stomach to know about the business. In one case, a book is undistinguished drivel; in the other, it's a bestseller and a blockbuster movie. One writer pumps gas to make meager ends meet; the other lives like a Borgia. Why? Because life is wildly absurd, that's why, and that's what Etgar Keret tries to capture in his stories.
Some of his tales are particularly successful. Like the one where a writer is held at gunpoint and ordered to tell the desperate gunman a story and he wants a good story too; something original, no cliche's, nothing he's heard a hundred times before. There's another story called "Lieland." It describes a place where every grandmother we've ever killed off to avoid going to a dreaded party, every run-over dog we used as an excuse when late for work actually exists and suffers. There's a delightfully wicked story about an unrepentant contract killer on death row; unlike most contract killers featured in first-person narratives, there's nothing to like about this guy. During his long and dark career, he had absolutely no scruples about who he'd murder. Kids, old ladies...he'd kill a "bushel of them." Why not? Money is money. Shortly before his execution, he tries to get the low-down on the tough guys in Hell from the priest come to take his confession. He wants the inside dope on who's who in the netherworld, specifically who he should kiss up to and who he can afford to simply knock-off. In the end, hell is nothing like what our killer expects—or what you expect either.
One thing Keret knows how to do effectively is to avoid the trap that many authors who write this brand of fantastical fiction often trip themselves into—and that is letting the tale drag on too long. That hemorrhoid (<—I didn't even try spelling it this time; I just copy-and-pasted from above) story is a good example. It's only about two pages in length. Any longer and it would have become forced and tedious; it's a joke to begin with and like many jokes it's length alone that can often be the difference between a laugh and a groan. Even short, it wasn't such a good joke, which is ironic since, as I already noted, it was the clinching reason I borrowed this book from the library in the first place.
Magic goldfish, walk-on terrorists, the Butterfly Effect as manifested with a knifing at a fast food place called "Cheesus Christ," a woman who can only reach shattering orgasms with lovers named "Ari," another woman who finds a little zipper under her lover's tongue and takes the chance of unzipping it, an estranged father who conspires with his young son to "kill" his mother-in-law...you'll find all these oddities and curiosities and plenty more in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door.
In the end, this collection is like a bag of potato chips. A quick, easy, and crunchy snack. You can even read it while the television is on; many of the stories are no longer than a commercial. Some of the chips are broken, others crushed to crumbs, the bag is not as full as it looks before you open it, a lot of it is just air, but every time you reach inside you come away with something if only a tasty trace of grease and salt you can lick off your fingers.
No comments:
Post a Comment