Pipelines

Short as video-clips, Etgar Keret’s stories combine postmodernist kitsch with a fine sense of the absurd. This nightmarish world, part-Kafkaesque and part-Lewis Carroll, bears the stamp of a thoroughly Israeli reality. Seemingly realistic stories turn into outlandish fantasy: having been deserted by his girlfriend, Meir meets four dwarfs who help him pass the time with beer and a game of cards; a Mossad agent who suspects everyone sees a strange Russian dwarf emerge from his own head; a group of Israeli soldiers discover that the “terrorists” who attacked them are a bunch of Hebrew-speaking rabbits. In one of the stories, a man waiting on the street hears from a passerby that all the buses are dead. When he goes to the central bus station, he sees “hundreds scattered all over the place, rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their shattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt.” The story manages to be both whimsical and deeply serious, a flight of fancy built around an image from the very real world of suicide bombings.

In one of the stories, a man waiting on the street hears from a passerby that the buses are all dead. When he goes to the central bus station, he sees “hundreds scattered all over the place, rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their shattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt.” The story manages to be both whimsical and deeply serious, a flight of fancy built around an image from the very real world of suicide bombings.