WORKS OF ETGAR KERET

One day I found upon the comics shelves of the otherwise pretty lousy Holgate Branch Library, a short walk from my home, a volume called How To Love, containing works by the Actus comics collective.  Seriously, the Holgate Branch Library is the lousiest library I have ever encountered.  It used to be pretty okay for a little neighborhood branch library but it seemed that once every few years they would undertake an assessment which concluded that they should reduce the number of  actual books, and see that the ones they kept were mostly thin illustrated books with shiny covers with the word dummy or idiot in the title.  If you just want to browse it is worse than useless - it is insulting.  A real tragedy considering how great almost every other library in the city is. 

I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love,  and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives.  I was ashamed to be surprised.  For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective.  Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of  works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret.  I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.

Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through.  They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them.  His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world.  However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N. 

Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results.  The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap.  An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping.  It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie.  There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings.  There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean.  There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99.  Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it.  It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics.  It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.

If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here.   You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.

So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel?  Try not to freak out when I tell you this.  That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth.  You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place.  Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you.  We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories.  He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.