Unbidden Stories displays a characteristic eccentricity of vision, and a unique way of zooming in on their subjects. In “How Can You Lose Your Cool, When the Kinneret’s as Calm as a Pool?” an irritable, suspicious “very big man” is sent by friends to regain his equilibrium in Tiberias, where he is fed seaweed pills by a Japanese representative of Shu-Mu-Shu Pharmaceuticals. He responds with typical paranoia. Even when the writer fleetingly deals with the Arab-Israeli conflict in “Death in the Olive Grove,” the story, which includes a gory stabbing, shocks precisely due to its apparent apathy and flatness.
