From the Publisher
A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.
The New York Times -
Joseph Weisberg
…when Keret's stories work, they present an extraordinary vision, a fresh, original and effective portrait of a society and its beleaguered young men. In three-page bursts, he shows us an Israel no longer filled with pioneers and heroes but with ordinary people—a view from the ground, as genuine as it is bleak.
Publishers Weekly
Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like "Nothing," about a woman who "loved a man who was made of nothing" because "this love would never betray her," and "Freeze!" about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: "Not Human Beings," in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in "A Bet," when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of "Moonlighting," suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. (Apr.)
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Kirkus Reviews
Forty-six stories in a range of tones and styles, from slapstick to surrealism. The stories vary in length between one and eight pages, and Keret (stories: The Nimrod Flipout, 2006, etc.) is able to squeeze a lot between the covers. Many of his characters are not overburdened by introspective tendencies. There's Nahum, for example, whose childhood "seemed like a cavity in somebody else's tooth-unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him," and Mindy, who in answer to her husband's query (why does she buy "crap" like superglue?) snaps back, " ‘the same reason I married you . . . to kill time.' " Some stories, like "Hat Trick," focus on the outre, in this case a magician whose climactic trick is the banal one of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. One day, in front of a bored and diminished audience at a child's birthday party, he succeeds only in pulling out the rabbit's bloody head, much to the consternation of the magician but to the delight and enthusiasm of the partygoers. He finds that with this new trick he's much more in demand. "The Summer of '76" looks at the serene and happy reality of a child oblivious to most of the craziness surrounding him. "Knockoff Venus" has a nameless narrator who confesses to his therapist that he "needed something I could believe in. A great love that would never go away." His therapist recommends he get a dog. In "Not Human Beings," a soldier named Stein tries to put together in some coherent way his impressions of what's happening in Gaza: "He tried to put all the images together into a single, coherent reality, but he couldn't."Stein's dilemma is emblematic of Keret's method: The stories read like fragments of reality-personal, political and evenmetaphysical. It's hard to know how to piece them together.
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