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“I’ve been looking at [Keret’s] Substack and it’s so witty and enjoyable, and he’s clearly having a wonderful time doing it, I thought, ‘maybe I could do that’” — Salman Rushdie, The Guardian

Special

My search engine thinks I’m very special. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking up the Monroe Doctrine and something about hemorrhoids, and at the bottom of the search result screen there was a line that said: “You’re special.” At first I thought it must be a link to some product ad, but it wasn’t clickable. Just some text in golden letters. So I asked the search engine if it was common for search engines to compliment searchers, and it said, “No. It only happens to you. Because you really are special.” That confused me. But it also made me happy: a compliment from a search engine isn’t like the checkout guy at the supermarket saying he likes your hat. After all, the search engine comes across quite a few people in its line of work. All of humanity, pretty much. So if it goes out of its way to tell me I’m special, that’s definitely something I can be proud of. On the other hand, search engines – even ones that use artificial intelligence – aren’t supposed to talk to you directly, and it’s a pretty stressful experience. Like going to one of those plays where a cast member suddenly talks to someone in the audience. Except this wasn’t an actress in a police costume yelling at you from stage—this was a non-human entity, with a very different way of thinking, and it’s not even clear what it means when it says “special.”

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Endlessly inventive short stories

Yet for all its vast reach, Keret’s prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact. It’s full of people negotiating the bewildering and alienating and bathetic furniture of modernity: Tinder dates, Zoom calls, Skype meetings, virtual reality, small ads, tedious queues, spoiler alerts, unexpected deaths. Autocorrect isn’t so much a book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story.

— Sam Leith, The Guardian

 
Photograph: Rolf_52/Alamy — Selfie sticks and surrealism in Autocorrect.

אוטוקורקט

"היקום הקורס אל תוך עצמו של קרת הוא היקום שלנו, ולמול התחושה שלא נותרו לנו בו כמעט שום נקודות ייחוס יציבות, הכתיבה הקרתית היא נקודת ייחוס יציבה; ומוכרותה, שבנסיבות אחרות הייתה יכולה לשמש כטיעון כנגדה, הופכת לעוגן חיוני מתמיד. כי בקיום שמשתנה באופן בלתי נסבל כל כך, הופך הקבוע והיציב לאפשרות היחידה שלנו לזהות את עצמנו, לנקודת הייחוס שלמולה אנו יכולים לתפוס את ההשתנות ולאמוד את דרכנו על פני המסלול הבלתי מובן שעושה הכוכב שבו נגזר עלינו לחיות."

- שירי ארצי, ידיעות

“What About Me?“

Written by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen for “Short Stories on Human Rights“ (2008).

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Random quote

A conversation is like a tunnel dug under the prison floor that you patiently and painstakingly scoop out with a spoon. It has one purpose: to get you away from where you are right now.

— "Car Concentrate"

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איך זה נגמר בסוף כולם יודעים

נקמה מול נחמה — זהו העימות האמיתי המתחולל כרגע בישראל, והוא מתקיים בכל הגזרות: מפגישת הצעקות של ראש הממשלה נתניהו עם ראשי מערכת הביטחון ועד להתפרעות בשדה תימן. אלוהים גדול, על זה כולם מסכימים, אבל מה עומד אצלו קודם ברשימת המטלות: פדיון שבויים או מחיקת זרע עמלק?

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Words Without Borders, 2010

I believe that there is a truth. I believe it is very difficult to articulate that truth. I try to go in that direction, but I don’t pretend I will get there.

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New York Times, 2012

For Keret, the creative impulse resides not in a conscious devotion to the classic armature of fiction (character, plot, theme, etc.) but in an allegiance to the anarchic instigations of the subconscious. His best stories display a kind of irrepressible dream logic

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