Etgar Keret
Plastic people
Todd McEwen is alarmed by Etgar Keret's world of masculine fury and fantasy in Missing Kissinger
by Todd McEwen
The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007
Missing Kissinger
by Etgar Keret, trans Miriam Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston
211pp, Chatto & Windus, £11.99
These are 46 horror stories from Israel, though they acrobatically shape-shift from the political to the fabulous, and are outwardly comic. They amount to a worldview more frightening than their subjects (and these are scary enough: the Holocaust, sexual dysfunction, sadistic birthday-party magicians). Etgar Keret's locale is that of male confusion, loneliness, blundering, bellowing and, above all, stasis. His narrator is trapped in an angry masculine wistfulness which is awful to behold in its masturbatory disconnection from the world's real possibilities and pleasures.
The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007
Missing Kissinger
by Etgar Keret, trans Miriam Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston
211pp, Chatto & Windus, £11.99