Reading the World - Book Review - The Nimrod Flip Out by Etgar Keret translated from the Hebrew

As Reading the World month comes to a close, I've had a ball expanding the list of original languages I've read translations from to include French, Norwegian, Croatian, Hebrew, Japanese and Greek (I hope by being lazy I'm not forgetting any of the languages).  And the good thing, there are more books to come covering Belgian, German, Swedish and I believe Finnish.  Oops, I did forget Chinese.

Thanks to Chad Post, Karl Pohrt and the rest of the folks behind organizing this month and helping me realize just how much I'd shut myself off from by limiting my reading to predominantly contemporary American writers.

Book Review 2006-015

The Nimrod Flip Out by Etgar Keret translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston

2006 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux  167 pages

Etgar Keret packs 30 stories into this scant 167 page collection, and accomplishes this by including some 15 stories clocking in at 4 pages or less.  The impressive thing is how much he actually packs into those 4 page stories.  Where one might usually look at such short stories as vignettes or slices of life, Keret actually creates some stirring work here.

Surprise Egg has a doctor determining that a woman killed in a terrorist attack would have died soon anyway due to the many large tumors throughout her body.  He struggles with deciding whether or not to tell her widow that this was the case.  The story ends with the husband fretting over not having driven his wife to work with him that fateful morning. 

Even some of the more surreal stories have some emotion to them – the opener, Fatso, has the narrator’s girlfriend telling him she has a secret.  It’s not, as he worries, that she’s sleeping around.  Instead, it’s the fact that at night she turns into a large hairy man with a gold pinkie ring.  After hanging around with this ‘fatso’ version of his girlfriend, he finds he still loves her.

The majority fo the stories have some weird aspect to them – Halibut has a man arguing with the fish that he’s ordered for dinner;  Bottle has a man win a bet by putting another in a bottle at a bar;  and in the story A Good Looking Couple, Keret even allows a cat and a door to give their thoughts to the reader.

Keret also draws his reader from story to story by both having some of the stories so short (who couldn’t sit for just four more pages) and by having some great first sentences:  “At age thirty-one, Himme found that almost all the dreams the people closest to him ever had for him were coming true:” (Himme);  “Usually we don’t kiss around other people.” (Ironclad Rules);  and “There’s nothing like the tits on an eighteen year old.” (The Tits on an Eighteen Year Old).  Barring a touch of anti-sexism, how could you not continue after those openers?  These stories and the others in the collection are a great introduction to Keret’s writing – they certainly have me looking for more.

4 stars

Comments

[Matt Bell]

I read this book right when it came out and loved it, then ran out and bought two of his earlier books (Jetlag and The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God). They're all great, and although I think the Nimrod Flipout is the strongest overall work, the novella that ends Bus Driver is probably the individual story I liked the best. Keret's definitely a writer I'll be looking at again.

Also, KGB Bar Lit has a couple of his stories in their initial issue: http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/fiction/three_stories_b.html.

Thanks for giving attention to a great writer-- More people should know about Keret, and with the amount of press he's getting for this book, hopefully they finally will.