The Girl on the Fridge: Stories | Etgar Keret | Poignant, effective, topical, and raw

The Girl on the Fridge: Stories | Etgar Keret | Uneven, but mostly good

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The Girl on the Fr...

	The Girl on the Fridge: Stories Etgar Keret Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad?such are the denizens of Etgar Keret?s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret?s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.

Poignant, effective, topical, and raw

A great friend of mine loaned me this book saying is changed her. It had an amazing effect on me too. The book is written in very short stories, no more than a page or three at most. Each story is complete, explores an idea, an event, often with an unexpected component, not really a twist, just unexpected. The book is just the essence of stories. It's like a great red wine reduction ... flavorful, deep in color, hints of what could be a much bigger wine, but concentrated to accent your current mood.I think the first two stories: asthma and the marriage story stuck with me the most. The line in the first story goes something like this:
"When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."

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Uneven, but mostly good

This collection of short stories is very uneven in quality. The weak ones seem merely flippant, the strong ones remind me of prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire. My first impression after reading a couple of the stories was mostly negative. Upon finishing the book, I realized the power and beauty of the best ones greatly outweigh the flimsiness of the weak. Definitely worth reading.

not happy but fun stories

Keret's stories are rarely happy, but they're fun. Their fluidity and lack of surface complications, plus the casual bits of surrealism, make them different in the best kind of way: they are different because of a unique simplicity, not because of a fatal dose of complexity and effort. The stories in "The Girl on the Fridge" aren't perfect, yet there are a handful that make the book well worth reading.
I look forward to reading Keret's other books.

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Occassionally more than clever and odd

I bought this book because I thought that several of the stories in Keret's book "The Nimrod Flipout" were truly incredible. Those stories, which were perfect gems, made a strong and lasting impression on me. They didn't just make me think. They were more than merely clever and odd. They hit me in the gut, in my emotional core.

Very few of the stories in "Girl on the Fridge" did that. But some of them did, and this book of stories is certainly worth reading. Still, many stories seemed frivolous, or merely odd, intelligent, or cleverly written. In my opinion, none was as good as the best stories from "The Nimrod Flipout."

"Girl on the Fridge" is a grab-bag. When Keret is good, he's excellent, but when he's not, reading can require a little effort. For me, the percentage of incredible stories wasn't quite high enough.

I don't want to put this book down too much! Keret is a superb writer, and, even when his stories didn't wow me, I was still impressed by how much he could accomplish in so few words. There are more than 40 stories in this book, each is only a few pages long, and a number of them still manage to pack quite a punch! And many of the rest, which didn't hit me as hard, were still quite clever and odd.

I certainly recommend you read Keret's other book: The Nimrod Flipout: Stories. I think it was better.

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