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.
- Languages
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English, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish & Spanish/Latin America
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English
New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2008 -
French
Arles, Actes Sud, 2008;
Paris, Editions de l'Olivier, 2019 -
Greek
Athens, Kastaniotis, 2020 -
Italian
Rome, e/o, 2010;
Milan, Feltrinelli, 2019 -
Polish
Warsaw, WAB, 2007;
Warsaw, WAB, 2016 -
Spanish & Spanish/Latin America
Mexico City, Sexto Piso, 2017;
Madrid, Siruela, 2016;
Madrid, Siruela, 2019
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Title | Pipelines |
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Writer's Last Name | Keret |
Writer's First Name | Etgar |
Genre | Fiction |
Publisher (Hebrew) | Am Oved |
No. Pages | 168pp. |
Book title - Hebrew (phonetic) | Tzinorot |
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“ Pipelines… is Keret’s first book. All of Keret is already there – his dazzling style, his sense of imagery, of dialogue… A sweet madness inhabits his characters… and yet, poetry radiates from his work. ”
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“ Etgar Keret proves himself to be a master of fable, able to revisit all the essential themes with particular grace, to make humor and melancholy cohabit. ”
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“ Keret’s stories present an extraordinary vision, a fresh, original and effective portrait of a society and its beleaguered young men. ”
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“ Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. ”