Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is a collection of short stories by Etgar Keret and translated by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander, © Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2012
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KATIE WILLINGHAM it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I’m an Etgar Keret dude. I read “The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God” and while I super dig his style I thought he had a sort of a Raymond Carver thing where the way the story is told is provocative to the point where it blots out the story it’s telling. Like, I was really liking the collection, but then I realized that almost all of the narrators were weirdo shut-ins who didn’t seem to like anybody. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (I love weirdo shut-ins) but it made it hard to think of his book as anything but an exercise in style.
None of my misgivings with “The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God” keep me from wanting to read more Etgar Keret, though, and from what you’re saying here it sounds like the stories in “Suddenly” have a self-reflexive quality that might deepen his writing for me and that makes me MEGA PUMPED.
This whole thing is adorbs. ❤ the camera angles.
Thanks!!
You ate Honey Bunches of Oats for breakfast? That is pretty serious.
Is the absurdity in the stories the thing that makes them funny? This reminds me a bit about the stuff you were doing at Oxford with absurdism (mostly b/c of the word – I don’t know enough about the content to actually compare them. I guess that’s what I’m asking you hahaha is it comparable?)
I do think there’s an element of that because similar to Pinter or other absurdist writers, there’s underlying violence going on. It’s funny and deeply, deeply serious at the same time.