Etgar Keret. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories.
Cohen, Leslie
Miriam Shlesinger et al., trs. New York Thomas Dunne / St.
Martin's. 2001. 182 pages. $19.95. ISBN 0-312-26188-8
BLACK HUMOR IS ETGAR KERET'S literary calling card. The
twenty-two short stories and one novella in his collection The Bus
Driver Who Wanted to Be God give the reader a bittersweet taste of
contemporary Israeli society. Chuckles will be accompanied by much
wincing, since Keret zeroes in so capably on the foibles of the Israeli
man on the street.
In the title story Keret scrutinizes the inane "ideology"
of a discourteous bus driver whose first ambition in life was to be God
but who was satisfied to realize his second dream: to be a bus driver.
In "Hole in the Wall" Keret pokes fun at the narrator's
simplistic vision of Heaven as a place where a person can go to sleep at
night and leave his car keys in the ignition. By the end of the story,
the narrator has realized that the man he believed to be an angel is
really "just a liar with wings." "A Souvenir of
Hell" is an allegory in which the author draws a parallel between
the Israeli army and Hell. Focusing on the infrequency of home visits
(only once every hundred years in Hell), he writes: "If ever there
was an explanation, nobody remembers it anymore. By now it's more a
matter of maintaining the status quo."
Keret's use of language is crisp, and he loves to quip. In
"Goodman" he sums up the career of a condemned murderer with
the phrase, "His life wouldn't be worth a used tea bag."
Describing the hurt feelings of an unwanted child, he says, "Some
children have to run away from home in the middle of the night to join
the circus, but Dad took me in his car."
Nothing is too sacred for Keret's mockery. Thus, he retells
the biblical story of the ten plagues in a cynical tone, turning it into
a cover story for a tale of adultery. He sometimes writes from a
child's point of view, zeroing in on the hypocrisy of adult
behavior. In "Breaking the Pig," for example, the little boy
comes to love and value exactly the opposite of what his parents teach
him. The pig, a symbol of the impure and undesirable, becomes the
child's most treasured possession. To the chagrin of his parents,
the child goes a long way to protect his closest friend (the pig) from
harm.
Keret often juxtaposes the trivial with the ponderous. His
distinctive style is to place two very different subjects before the
reader, describing and commenting on each one separately. He drops a
trail of succinct information-crumbs, allowing the reader to pick up the
pieces and draw his own conclusions. Because his writing is so spare,
the allegorical nature of his implications is obvious.
Keret calls his writing "concentrated," and he is indeed
masterful at implying a person's life history in a few curt
phrases. Along with his offbeat sense of humor, his placement of the
mundane under the microscope renders his social commentary ingenious and
unique.
Leslie Cohen
Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Israel
