Hey, Etgar, don't give up the day job.
A bestselling Israeli author and TV comedy writer draws from previous story collections to introduce himself to an American readership
It isn't hard to see why a US publisher might think there would be a market for Keret’s fiction here: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is a veritable compilation of fashionable bad-writing tricks, with a level of humor that suggests Israeli sitcoms are not appreciably more clever than their American counterparts. The author uses a vaguely punk minimalist style, drawing tediously on “like,” “you know,” and by-now-stale scatology to mimic the voice of young urban anomie, but Keret can't hide a depressingly conventional sentimentality (or a certain smarmy misogyny) behind the fake toughness of his prose. The stories are mostly constructed around facile ironies and comedy clichés. “Rabin's Death” tells of a street fight precipitated by the fact that the narrator's cat, run over by a motorcyclist, is named for the late Israeli prime minister. The title piece is about a loser whose life is changed for the worse when the bus driver in question commits a unique act of charity. The protagonist of “Missing Kissinger” is torn between his demanding girlfriend and his overbearing Jewish mother, each of whom expects him to cut out the other’s heart. Even the novella, “Kneller's Happy Campers,” the only substantial work here as well as the only new one, is fairly threadbare: a first-person tale of the special afterlife reserved for suicides, said afterlife bearing a depressing resemblance to the hellish real-life world of suburbia. All of these pieces are rendered with a tiresome flatness that even the skilled translators cannot resuscitate.
Hey, Etgar, don't give up the day job.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26188-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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