Untethered imagination looses tales

Stories

By Etgar Keret

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

171 pp. $12 (paperback)

nolead ends Intifadas, targeted killings, checkpoints, kidnappings, Qassam rockets, the occasional suicide bombing or massacre.

If you follow the news in American media about Israel, you might wonder what's worth celebrating in 10 days, when that harried nation turns 60.

One quick answer among many: a vibrant arts culture. The handful of foreign correspondents still operating in Israel after the media's downsizing in the last few years can't remotely cover it. Predisposed to "follow the gunfire" and, secondarily, the diplomacy, they're lucky if they catch an occasional movie between death counts.

All the arts flourish in Israel, which boasts internationally recognized excellence in film, music and literature. Europe's loss, you might say, has been Israel's gain. Yet it's probably through books that Americans make the easiest connection.

Here, too, in the anniversary boom of volumes relating to Israel, politics and history dominate: 1948 by controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris, a new bio of Golda Meir, Bernard Avishai's The Hebrew Republic, and many more.

Easy to miss among them would be Etgar Keret's The Girl on the Fridge, a short-story collection modestly issued as a paperback original. But don't miss it. Because in these slight, sometimes whimsical, always inventive tales by a 41-year-old writer recognized for a decade as one of his country's young prose talents, one sees the other Israel - of sparkling imagination - amid the pressures of endless conflict.

Take "Crazy Glue," a tale that mixes the wry dialogue of Philip Roth with the fey playfulness of Kafka. (You don't find Kafka funny? Go to the back of the class.)

A wife is telling her husband not to touch the superglue she bought, prompting a sharp exchange:

"There's nothing that needs gluing together," I snapped. "I can't understand why you buy all this crap."

"The same reason I married you," she shot back, "to kill time."

They start arguing about the picture on the glue's box, "with this guy hanging upside down from the ceiling."

"No glue can make a person stick like that," I said. "They took the picture upside down. He's standing on the floor. They just stuck a light fixture in the floor to make it look like a ceiling."

More early morning tension ensues. The husband heads to work, calls his mistress, tells her he can't see her, then stumbles through the afternoon until he heads home.

When he gets there, the fridge won't open. The receiver's stuck to the phone. His kitchen chair won't move.

You know where this is going? No, you don't. It could happen anywhere. It just happens to be happen in Israel.

Keter specializes in ideas for stories you don't encounter in most collections, where normal things happen to normal people, and taut description of the everyday counts as mission accomplished. Keter, by comparison, lives on another planet.

In "Hat Trick," the narrator, a magician who plays children's birthday parties, routinely pulls a rabbit (named Kazam) out of a hat, as people in his line of work tend to do.

One day, something goes wrong.

"I pulled Kazam by the ears, and something about him felt a little strange, lighter. . . . In my right hand I was holding Kazam's head, with his long ears and wide-open rabbit eyes. Just the head, no body. The head, and lots and lots of blood."

By the time he gets home, there are five messages on his answering machine: "All job offers. All from kids who'd witnessed the performance."

I told you: This is not Alice Munro, the short story as civilized reality. This is Etgar Keret.

Keret's stories offer prickly freshness from cover to cover. In "An Exclusive," a man kills a terrorist, then refuses to speak to a journalist who shows up. He'll only talk to another reporter at the paper - his ex-girlfriend, the one who's been blowing off his calls. She agrees to interview him. He interviews her back.

In the title story, a man explains to his current girlfriend that he broke up with an earlier one because she always wanted to be alone. In her childhood, the earlier girlfriend exhausted her older parents, who couldn't deal with her energy, her insistence on talking with them.

They got into the habit of putting her on top of the refrigerator, especially when they'd go out for a bit. The fridge was so tall she couldn't climb down. So she spent most of that early childhood on top of the refrigerator. With consequences.

Israeli fiction deserves a celebration itself when one thinks of how many extraordinary writers - including the Nobel Prize-winners S.Y. Agnon and Nelly Sachs - have been produced by one tiny country.

Much of that fiction has been haunting and historical (for instance, the work of Aharon Appelfeld), or rich in the psychological resonance of what it means to be a Jew (e.g., certain novels of A. B. Yehoshua). A frequent achievement is the elegiac, narrative capturing of modern Israeli life (I think of Amos Oz), or the extrapolation of the journalist's probing curiosity, exhibited in the work of Shulamith Harevan.

Keret's light, spare touch, which leaves less than an evanescent impression, continues to be a unique instrument in the orchestra of Israeli prose.

It's as if Keret were saying, "You can't hold down my hot-air balloon, and stifle my imagination, just because I am Israeli and this is Israel! What's that? You can? No, I won't let you. There, you're doing it again! But I'm going to fly away anyway. . . . "

In the tension that marks Keter's stories, the space between a childlike fancy that permits everything and an invasive reality that cuts things short, one feels the spirit of Israel itself.