Thursday, May 20, 2010

Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret is a well-known Israeli writer and story teller, who spoke last week at the Writer's Center in Biton Aharon, a small village north of Netanya, where a writer named Evan Fallenberg runs the Center. Etgar Keret is the latest writer he invited to speak about his work.

Keret was an engaging and enjoyable speaker, very disarming and casual, in a typical Israeli manner. He spoke about his entry into writing, that occured when he was in the IDF and was put in charge of guarding a group of computers and since he had nothing else to do he wrote for himself and produced a story that was quite off-key. Since he had no one to show the story to, he showed it to his brother, who promptly used it to pick up his dog's doo. This did not put Etgar off, and so he continued to amuse himself writing short stories, and has become a best seller in Israel and around the world.

He decribed the first story he ever wrote: he was employed in a pipe making plant, and became in his spare time fascinated with making pipes of strange orientations. Finally he made a complex one, and then put some marbles down it, but they failed to come out the other end. He tried this several times, but it failed. So he made a big pipe large enough to take himself with the same construction, and then when it was ready he crawled in, and when he came out the other side he found a group of angels sitting around playing with the marbles. They said to him, "are you the one who sent us the marbles, thanks, we were getting really bored here." He also gave us two stories to read, one about his growing up with the knowledge of his grandparents death in the Holocaust entitled "Shoes" and the other about his three former army friends entitled "The Nimrod flip-out" - one of the best titles ever. It seems that there were four friends, but one of them committed suicide, and the other three think that he is inhabiting their brains in rotation.

I asked him a question: why is it that the stories he gave us to read and many of his other stories are written in such simple language? Is it because Hebrew is not a rich literary language like English, or is it because he is dealing only with children and drugged-out soldiers, or is it a deliberate attempt by him to communicate the immedicy of simple, direct speech? His answer was long and informative. He said that although Hebrew has ancient Biblical origins, spoken Hebrew is very different and especially in the army people speak with a lot of colloquial slang. He is so used to this kind of speech that he uses it to write his stories, rather than try to tailor them or "improve" the language as someone might do in English. In fact, his stories are not about communicating about the surroundings, no descriptions of trees or the environment, but he likes to take ordinary circumstances to their logical and sometimes absurd conclusions. His laconic, almost monosyllabic, style (in English) with its existential outcomes, apparently best represents the secular Israeli mind.

Someone else asked him what are his influences and he said his father principally, who used to tell him bed-time stories about how they survived the war in the Warsaw Ghetto and made things seem human and not so frightening to him. Nevertheless, his mother lost all her family during the Holocaust and this has definitely affected his outlook on life. I found his reponses honest and informal.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home