Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer that one critic called, “the Amos Oz of his generation”  and who is known for his extremely short flash fiction pieces (stories no more than two or three pages). This style can often be frustrating and unfulfilling just as it can be powerful and thought-provoking. It’s one of those paradoxes; Keret’s greatest strength is his greatest weakness. It’s hard to develop an emotional attachment to characters, their situation, and even the idea behind the story in so few words and pages, but such a style lends itself perfectly to the themes and content in which is a brief soul-defining moments come out of nowhere, providing epiphanies or live-changing events when you least expect them.

In this collection, Keret writes stories about a convenient shop in Uzbekistan built at the mouth of Hell, a boy learning to save money who starts to care more about his piggy bank than the money inside, a dissatisfied girlfriend who demands her boyfriend bring back his mother’s heart as proof of his love, an afterlife for people who commit suicide, and many others.

In the story about the boy and his piggy bank the father forces his son to keep a piggy bank in order to teach him the value of money and by extension the value of things. The irony of the story is that he stops caring about the money inside and cares about the object carrying the money. The irony is he doesn’t learn the value of money at all. On the surface, it seems he at least understands the value of emotionally caring about other people more than money, but the reader thinks about it more and realizes the “person” he cares about is a piggy bank. He cares about it like a pet, but it is a thing. He has fallen in love with things and emotionally cares about it the way he should people symbolically representing what happens if you take the logic of learning the value of money too far (you fall in love with things, the ultimate form of materialism).

The best story in the collection is the longest “Kneller’s Happy Campers” which is about an afterlife where people who commit suicide go. Basically the afterlife for suicides is basically the regular world, only a little crappier, where pointless miracles happen, but only if they’re pointless and serve no purpose. It is a very clever story. A world that is basically the regular world, only a little crappier is the perfect “hell” for someone who commits suicide; after all, committing suicide is an attempt to escape the world. Well, now they have to live in the world even longer. At the center of this story is a love story in which there are brief moments of happiness, which also suggests that the moral of the story is that we create our own happiness and misery in the world. Our obsessions and mindsets prevent us from being happy.

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