Seventeen. Takala Bi’ktze Hagalaxia [Malfunction at the Edge of the Galaxy] by Etgar Keret
2018, Zmora Bitan Publishing, 160 pages. Written in Hebrew, read in Hebrew.
(Medium are making me clarify issues regarding possible affiliate links in my articles so please read this.)
It’s been a long ride for me and Etgar Keret. There we were, together, from his very first book — him writing, I’m reading — and I fell in love right away with his concise, short stories, dealing mostly with themes that are slightly off our side of reality, but still not as far off as to be considered fantasy, or science fiction. They all take place in our world, our country, even, but they all share a sense of hyper-reality, something that makes a lot of sense in the world in which these stories take place, but not so much in the world in which they are read.
We’ve now arrived at his sixth book, and he has now been translated into many languages, won many awards and gained a new perspective on the world and his own stories. And yet he keeps the same method and the same genre — not a novel to his name yet, the only departure from the very-short-story realm was a novella that had the distinction of being made into a movie with Tom Waits. But now we’ve arrived at a point in time in which the world itself is hyper-realistic, and some of our culture has caught up with him.
“Black Mirror”, for example, which in my eyes is nothing but a futuristic, technology-driven version of his stories, has become very popular, and Keret sees them and raises them with a story of his own, that wouldn’t feel out of place in their next series. His other stories are darker, more sinister, dealing with death, and loss, and despair, more than other things. On some occasions he steps out of his comfort zone, almost forgetting to come back — with the title story, for example, being spread across the whole book as an epistolary device.
Keret’s stories have remained sharp, some of them — especially the last one — linger with you for much longer than you’ve finished reading them, and in this fast paced world, they are a quick and rewarding read.
(An English translation of this book has not been made yet. I’ll add a link to it when it becomes available.)
