Keret

A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

I think I got sent Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2010) as a review copy in 2012, when it was translated from Hebrew into English – by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander. It’s a collection of short stories, which is perhaps why there are three translators. I certainly couldn’t detect which story was translated by whom, which suggests that they all did a good job of letting Keret’s distinctive approach come through.

2012 was probably the heyday of review books arriving chez moi, and quite a lot of them ended up at charity shops because I couldn’t keep up – but something about Suddenly, a Knock on the Door made me keep it on the shelf. And I’m so glad I did, because it is really rather brilliant – and has made me keen to seek out more by Keret.

The stories are mostly set in Israel, where Keret is among the most prominent modern writers, though a lot of them are in a slightly surreal version of Israel. Sometimes that means an element of the bizarre is incorporated, in a magical realist way that means the characters aren’t surprised by this disruption of the normal. In ‘Unzipping’, for instance, Ella is cut on her lip when kissing Tsiki.

They didn’t kiss for a few days after that, because of her cut. Lips are a very sensitive part of the body. And later when they could, they had to be very careful. She could tell he was hiding something. And sure enough, one night, taking advantage of the fact that he slept with his mouth open, she gently slipper her finger under his tongue—and found it. It was a zip. A teensy zip. But when she pulled at it, her whole Tsiki opened up like an oyster, and inside was Jurgen. Unlike Tsiki, Jurgen had a goatee, meticulously shaped sideburns and an uncircumcised penis. Ella watched him in his sleep. Very, very quietly she folded up the Tsiki wrapping and hid it in the kitchen cupboard behind the rubbish bin, where they kept the bin bags.

In another story, a character finds himself in ‘Lieland’, peopled by all the lies he has made up as alibis to excuse lateness or forgotten homework. In one of my favourite stories, ‘What, of this Goldfish, Would You Wish?’, a low-budget filmmaker is going door-to-door to ask people what they’d ask for if a goldfish granted them wishes – and stumbles across a man who has such a goldfish, with unexpected results.

Many, perhaps most, of the stories don’t have anything supernatural in them – but there is still a surreal element, offset by the plain and matter-of-fact way in which the stories are written. In the title story, a man is held at gunpoint and told to make up a story. In ‘Healthy Start’, a lonely man pretends to be any stranger that someone is expecting to meet in a café. A very short story called ‘Joseph’ is tangentially about a suicide bomber, but in such a quiet way that it seems incidental.

Keret’s mind is clearly overflowing with creativity. Most of the stories are very short – the exception is ‘Surprise Party’, about a man who goes missing on the day that his partner has invited everyone in his phone contacts to a surprise party, and only three turn up. Because they stories are so short, there are an awful lot of curious and clever ideas needed for a collection. None of the ideas are given time to burn out, though Keret often deploys the anti-climax or gentle petering out of a story in a way that is more effective than a denouement. He has so many ideas that ‘Creative Writing’ even flings out some gems that would make fascinating novels, just as throwaway examples:

The first story Maya wrote was about a world in which people split themselves in two instead of reproducing. In that world, every person could, at any given moment, turn into two beings, each one half his/her age. Some chose to do this when they were young; for instance, an eighteen-year-old might split into two nine-year-olds. Others would wait until they’d established themselves professionally and financially and go for it only in middle age.

The heroine of Maya’s story was splitless. She had reached the age of eighty and, despite constant social pressure, insisted on not splitting. At the end of the story, she died.

I’m so glad I kept this collection on my shelves. The sort of topics and ideas Keret uses could so easily have become self-consciously quirky, but there is something in the subdued naturalism with which they’re told that balances out the wackiness, and makes them piercing insights into human relationships. Suddenly, a Knock at the Door is excellent and quite unlike anything else I’ve read before – or, rather, a much better version of the sort of thing I’ve seen attempted a number of times.

And now, of course, I face the age-old dilemma – clearing one book off the shelf, only to now want to seek out as much of Keret’s backlist as I can.