LUCIDMEDIA

Depressingly Endearing: Etgar Keret's World of Literature Intrigues and Despairs

Written by Rachel Rain Packota Wednesday, 18 March 2009 13:57

“The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God” is a collection of 22 shorts, each as depressing and witty as the last: “Breaking The Pig” follows a boy forced by his parents to save up coins in a piggybank in order to learn the meaning of “hard work”, but he soon grows more fond of the faithful pig than the elusive Bart Simpson doll his is supposed to be saving for; “A Souvenir of Hell” has a young woman falling in love with a strange visitor from the Underworld, praying that he will return to her despite obvious reasons why he cannot; An Israeli Special Forces soldier threatens a Palestinian rebel against his officers wishes (“Cocked & Locked”); and, a daemon in “One Last Story and That’s It” pays a visit to a writer in order to reclaim the Talent he borrowed.

All stories deal with desire for connection or permanence, and the ultimate states of loss and dissatisfaction.  “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, the final story in “The Bus Driver…”, illustrates this in the imagined aftermath of suicides.

“Kneller’s Happy Campers” is a 26-chapter saga about an after-life limbo for suicide victims.  Turns out that hari kari is not an easy out, but merely an exit to a listless existence just a little bit worse that the one that was left.  It begins with the line, “Two days after I killed myself I found a job here at some pizza joint”.  Hardly the expected bliss that was much sought-after.

Throughout the next thirty-nine pages, the reader is introduced to multiple characters as they – having already given up everything in preparation for nothing – learn to live for something.  This nether-world is one they cannot escape from and it is in this gloomy land they must try to work on their problems and issues, their plight to escape all of these ultimately a failure.

In 2007, “Kneller’s Happy Campers” was turned into a film by Croatian director Gorac Dukic with the tag-line, “Life is a trip, but the afterlife is one hell of a ride”.  He won Keret’s approval and the film option by adding his own details to the after-world: characters who cannot smile, a night sky absent of stars, and a soundtrack featuring mostly artists who committed suicide.

Keret is very popular in his home country of Israel, his words particularly devoured by the young.  Like the lives of the people around him, hope and sadness inhabit his writing.  In a place where death’s doorstep is as close to one as the words on this page (or screen) are to you, the Reader, there is a constant yearning for closeness and safety, but more often than not there is disappointment and the nagging feeling that nothing much is really happening.

Three of the graphic novellas in “Jetlag” are based on stories found in “The Bus Driver…”: “Margolis” (based on “Breaking the Pig”); “Passage to Hell” (based on “A Souvenir of Hell”; and the title story “Jetlag”.  Each is interpreted and illustrated by a different artist from the Actus Comics collective, and thus there are five unique art-styles featured in this collection.

“HaTrick”, the tale of a magician whose most famous Rabbit-In-The-Hat trick goes horribly wrong, is easily my favourite with its eerie depictions of eyeless children.  These are, after all, the same audience members who delight when a dead baby is pulled from the hat instead of a living animal.  One wonders if Keret is making a commentary on the young Israeli extremists who find enjoyment in the death and pain of others.  He is certainly political to some degree.

If I could pick one story to epitomize Etgar Keret’s outlook on life, “Rabin’s Dead” would seem to best explain the his point-of-view.  The unnamed narrator and his friend, Tobin, react with surprising violence when their cat is killed by a motorist, and by the end of the story the conflict is still unresolved.

From distrust of the law (by themselves and by their neighbours), to the point of a severe altercation, to taking the law into their own hands with a crowbar, the friends reminisce about finding Rabin as a kitten:  The odds of his appearance at the same square where fifth Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin was killed for trying to uphold peace; the chances of Yitzhak Rabin being shot instead of by-standing foreign minister Shimon Peres; the chances of feline Rabin dying by a motor accident now rather than years earlier by the extreme weather they had found him in; the chances of someone still being clobbered over feline Rabin’s death if he had been given the name Shalom instead.

Credit needs also to be given to the translators – Dalya Bilu, Marganit Weinberger-Rotman, Anthony Berris, and especially Miriam Shlesinger – whose story interpretations are never overly-wrought with flowery language, nor too sparse of description.  Certainly, it is never easy to take a culturally-inclined piece of literature and make it accessible to a wider audience, but with their efficient translations “The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God” is an open door to an oft-mysterious world for Westerners.

Keret’s work is not easily digestible, but it is insightful.  He is an asset to anyone who considers themselves Globally-aware, and maybe even a necessity.