The Girl on the Fridge

In a perfect world the 29 or so books that I've read over the past year for this project would all have come directly from my bookshelf. I would not have bought books for a "nice price", nor would I have taken recommendations from friends and acquaintances. I certainly would not have checked out books from the library! But it's not a perfect world and I did all these things.

No one can write about the imperfect world more concisely, and with such dark humor as Etgar Keret, whose book of short shorts, The Girl on the Fridge, I just finished.

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer and I read his book The Nimrod Flipout a few years back and surprisingly loved it. Soon thereafter I saw a movie based on his writing, Wristcutters: A Love Story, and despite its unfortunate name, it was a wonderful movie which perfectly captured the essence of his style. He writes with a baudy humor-- frequent subjects are suicide and break ups and terrorism. The situations in which his characters interact swing back and forth between reality and the fantastic or dreamlike. Most of his protaganists act on impulses that most of us would check. The orderly who glibly can't recall the name of a recently deceased patient is attacked and strangled by the patient's roommate. A young man realizes he has the power to yell "freeze!" and then direct people to do whatever he desires. A magician's power to pull rabbits out of his hat is suddenly disrupted and the rabbits he pulls out are sometimes headless or bodiless, dripping with blood. Underneath all the id directed actions, however, are underlying fears and insecurities, making the stories honest and wistful.

I think the short story is the hardest thing to write-- to contain a scene or characterization in just 1000 words or so takes immense talent. Plus, Etgar Keret writes from a uniquely Israeli experience-- guns and violence are a major way of life there, and he doesn't gloss over that. I give this book 5/5 netflix stars.