Israeli writer Etgar Keret specializes in short fragments that are often no longer than three pages, sometimes less. I love short-shorts. I love microfiction. I love flash fiction. So I expected to love this collection, but instead I read through a collection that was a hit-or-miss experience, with more misses than hits. Nevertheless, even when many of the stories didn’t work they displayed a cleverness, imagination, and good comedic timing of a rising talent. Often the main problems were execution and the wrong length to support the interesting ideas or develop a satisfying emotion connection and resolution. Most of these pieces felt like fragments of incomplete stories, leaving the reader unsatisfied or unsure about the takeaway.

The strongest tales were the fantastical ones like “Quanta” which was about personified intelligent Quanta who head to Albert Einstein’s house on Yom Kippur to ask for his forgiveness, do interviews with television networks who blame them for the Atom Bomb, and whose only friend the physicists don’t truly understand them. Another story that worked was Crazy Glue, a tale about a woman who purchases crazy glue to glue herself upside down in her apartment and eventually glues her husband permanently to her lips to prevent him from cheating on her in an affair. Knockoff Venus is about a loser who goes out with the goddess Venus after the old pagan gods immigrate to Israel. Freeze! is a tale about a young man who can control reality and the people around him by speaking commands. He uses this power at first to sleep with all the super models he wants, but then he grows tired of these fake relationships that he controls with his powers and tries to enter a more meaningful relationship. “Hat Trick” is a tale about an aging magician struggling to keep the interest of an increasing jaded and violence-loving population of modern Israeli children who would prefer to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and play violent video games than witness a rabbit being pulled out of a hat, until one day violent and severed objects start appearing from the hat instead. There are quite a few other tales that work as well; not to mention at the short length (no more than three pages) these works pack quite a punch when they are executed well.

However, many tales are just plain confusing or unsatisfying. One such tale is “Myth Milk” about a woman who watches her husband get shot and herself slapped by soldiers that tell her nicely they won’t rape her who then drinks myth milk and dreams of switching roles with her dead husband. The concept of myth milk is never explained. And in the end she awakens sexually aroused from the role reversal dream. The story is more confusing than enlightening. Another story that is baffling is “Slimy Shlomo is a Homo.” The story is about a sub taking a class a field trip to an Israeli park. Nobody likes Slimy Shlomo and everyone laughs at him when a bird poops on his hat. The sub is kind and takes care of him, which Shlomo to ask her why nobody likes him. The latter story doesn’t really go anywhere; it ends with the sub telling him she doesn’t know why nobody likes him, she is just a sub. There are many other sketches that are equally as unsatisfying.

Thematically, these stories are about the callousness and desensitization occurring among Israeli children. The children are the sons and daughters of people who suffered for their differences, yet now pick and tease Shlomo for his differences, without any reason for the action. The sub, although kind to Shlomo and willing to help him after incidents occur as part of her job, doesn’t seem to want to take the next step by getting more involved and challenging the bullies; she’s just a sub, it’s not her problem. This could apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which Keret addresses more directly in other stories, but it even could hint at the Holocaust. It’s precisely people expressing the attitudes of the sub (“not my problem, I’m just here to do my job”) and the hatred towards differences from one’s self that allowed for the Holocaust to take place.  However, even recognizing these possible interpretations, this particular story is still ultimately unsatisfying. It might be rich philosophically, but it’s not much of a story in its own right.

Sometimes the extreme shortness works against Keret. As Kyle Smith from People writes in a blurb on the back of my book, “Keret can do more with six . . . paragraphs than most writers can with 600 pages,” but in many cases these stories would be improved by expansion. Some of these stories work well at this length, while others felt like they were missing another page or two to be completed. According to a NY Times review of the book these stories are actually early works from the 80s, while his other short story collections are from a later and more mature period. This might explain the sketchiness of the stories and mediocre execution in certain tales. I was intrigued enough by these earlier works, even the ones that didn’t work, to want to explore some of his later collections.