The political statement of this little volume is inspiring: a book of short fiction written jointly by one of Israel's leading authors (Keret) and a Palestinian living in exile (El-Youssef). The book itself is difficult to obtain at a reasonable price, but fortunately Keret is as prolific as he is brilliant and several other collections are listed on Amazon: THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE, THE BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD, FOUR STORIES -- and, less readily, two of the volumes from which the stories in GAZA BLUES were taken: MISSING KISSINGER and KNELLER'S HAPPY CAMPERS. El-Youssef, who now writes from London, is represented on Amazon only by his novella THE ILLUSION OF RETURN; he is an author whom I can respect more than enjoy.
I was a little disappointed to discover that in the book itself, the work of the two authors abutted but did not intermingle. Fifteen fragments by Keret, mostly very short, are followed by a single long story by El-Youssef; about sixty printed pages in all are devoted to each writer. They share a similarly manic vision, with a tendency towards the surreal. Keret's stories are all oblique; only the very short title story and a few others deal directly with the reality of living in a divided land, but whether by deliberate selection or as the result of being published in this context, all of them seem to reflect the underlying violence of life in Israel today. El-Youssef's story, "The Day the Beast Got Thirsty," is set in and around a refugee camp in Lebanon, where the author himself grew up. His style reminds me a little of Joseph Heller's in CATCH-22, as his protagonist, mostly half-stoned, wanders around making deals with one shady operator to obtain a travel visa, talking to another about whether symbolism or realism is the correct medium for a Drama to Advance the Cause, pursuing a girl he calls ugly but sleeps with anyhow, weaving in and out of fighting between the various factions, and avoiding the security apparatus. I'm sure it is a perfect distillation of the futility of life in exile, but it makes rather amorphous reading.
Keret's stories, by contrast, are like sparks from a bonfire, brilliant and potentially lethal. In some, violence is close to the surface. A woman telescopes an entire history of outrage and isolation into a recurrent nightmare while she is racked with cramps. The timid son of the Head of the Mossad, bullied at school, takes revenge in his own way. Two stories contain a family dog that attacks other people and has to be killed. Other tales deal with isolation and retreat: a wife gets back on her husband by sticking everything in the apartment down with crazy glue; a soldier seals himself up in a vacuum pack; a factory worker makes a twisted pipe that becomes a wormhole to heaven. Perhaps my favorite story, though, is a true one: a 32-year-old woman killed by a suicide bomber who is found on autopsy to have had a cancer so pervasive that it would have killed her within weeks anyway. "What is cancer," the pathologist thinks, "if not a terrorist attack from above?" It is a rare moment of simple tragic truth. Otherwise, from both authors, what you get is bizarre manic laughter; it may not be any answer, but it is at least a passport through the pain. [Keret 5 stars; El-Youssef 3]
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Roger BrunyateBewertet in den USA am13. April 2011
Off the Wall and Over the Fence
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