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Zakaria Omar zakaria83 — Short Short Stories Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. This is the third book of his short stories that I’ve read and I’ve loved them all. To give you one idea of why I like them, there are 46 stories in this collection, and the whole thing is only 171 pages long. Most stories come in at 1½ to four pages, which means you can read two while you’re waiting for your bread to toast, or your partner to warm your side of the bed for you, or your children to finish in the bathroom (well, maybe I'm fibbing about that last one). “Brevity is the Soul of Wit” Polonius said this in “Hamlet”. He was right then and he is equally right now. He is also right to suggest that any attempt to paraphrase or explain his expression would only require more than his six words, unless you strip it down to something like “shorter is better” (which might be right, but it doesn’t convey the meaning of humour or insight that “wit” does, unless you think that all short things are funny). The whole idea of a short story is to do as much with as little as possible. Yet, I find that Etgar Keret has a skill much greater than most of his peers. He has an ability to pare words and sentences down so far that they teeter (and titter) on the absence of meaning. Any more cuts and you wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Instead, he stops at a point where what remains is the bare minimum required to convey meaning. Nevertheless, he invites us to infer what might have been omitted or cut. In other words, he expects readers to supply some of the meaning. It’s a collaborative effort. To this extent, he is like Beckett, in the way he walks right up and stares into the face of the absurd, only he is absurdly funny as well. We laugh while we wait for Godot. Take These Words I suppose every writer does it, but another thing I love about Etgar Keret is that he takes the same words that we have all been given and weaves some amazing tales with them. How come he can take our vocabulary and do so much better than the rest of us with exactly the same words? Some of his characters are children, and you can sense that they have acquired their words and mannerisms from the adults around them. The children take their parents’ words and use them, or perhaps the parents’ words use the children to convey them. What is going on here? What magic dust does he have that we don’t have? Remove Everything but the Magic I don’t mean to imply that he is unique, however. He reminds me of how I have responded in the past to Kurt Vonnegut or Richard Brautigan or Tom Robbins or John Irving. Only just as I used to think that Tom Robbins and John Irving were long-winded versions of Richard Brautigan, Etgar Keret is like an abbreviated version of Brautigan. The brevity has been abbreviated, but the magic is still there. Perhaps there is something happening here beyond words. Not just something that words can’t describe, but something that words aren’t trying to describe. Something is happening between the words. These words are playing with each other before our very eyes, dancing, flirting, kissing, falling in love, even fornicating. Making Something from Nothing So far, I’ve focused on Keret’s ability to strip away verbiage, but he’s also able to make something from nothing. In the story “Nothing”, a woman loves a man who is made of nothing. That’s more or less the first sentence, yet by the time you read it (two-thirds of the way into the book), you’re totally accepting of the possibility that this might be true: "Nothing in the world would have made her happier than to make love with him all night long, tasting his non-lips once again, feeling the uncontrollable quiver run through him, the emptiness spread through her body…She hadn’t the slightest doubt or apprehension. She knew that his love would never betray her. What could possibly let her down when she opened the door? An empty apartment? A numbing silence? An absence between the sheets of the rumpled bed?" This writer who works with less asks the question, “What is enough?” Can we make do with less? Can we make do with nothing? Is nothing less enough? (Sorry, I think I was only joking with that last one.) What Do We Still Have When You Take Everything Away from Us? Etgar Keret writes in Hebrew, although perhaps paradoxically even in translation his stories come across with both the richness of Jewish tradition and the independence of 21st century modernity: " ‘Is because you and me, we both terminal sick,’ Hans explained. I loved his fractured Hebrew, especially when he called me ‘terminal sick’, like I am waiting at some busy airport about to take off for an exciting, different place." Keret the modernist comes across as cheeky, sharp and fun. Yet he seems to appreciate and embrace the positives of Jewish culture. Despite (but perhaps because of) the Holocaust, Jewish culture continues and enriches all those who have access to it. Even in the darkest of times, Jews cannot have nothing, they cannot have “no compass, no map, no guide”. They have their culture and their traditions and their perception and their ways of seeing. To quote the terminally sick Hans again: "Then I see him on wall…mein Schatten, how you say, aah...shadow. I look at him and I know, my shadow he always with me. I know always what he is going to do, and him even the Germans they cannot take...Zauber (magic)." It’s our privilege and good fortune that Etgar Keret conveys some of this Zauber to us in his short short stories.

Joanna Swan jojo — The Memory Cage is a hugely impressive debut that reminded me of the work of Michael Morpurgo (one of my favourite children's authors). Eastham has combined successfully difficult and challenging themes as diverse as war, adoption, Alzheimer's disease and disability. It shouldn't really work but it just does, superbly. It's not too hard to read but the themes do make you think hard and at times the book is rather upsetting. One of the book's strongest elements is the characters. The protagonist, Alex, is digging up his grandfather's past in a bid to keep a promise. He doesn't want to lose his grandfather and he sees the pursuit of his grandfather's old memories as his only option. His determination and evident love for his older counterpart makes the story touching and heart-warming but most importantly believable. You trust Alex and his simply undeniable faithfulness. For me, The Memory Cage was like what any lesson should be. Through Eastham's story I learned so much and I was inspired to learn even more about every issue and topic incorporated into the tale. This was particularly the case with 'The Yugoslav Wars' which before reading this book I knew nothing about. From the snippets of Alex's past, which continued right through the book, I realised that the conflicts are something that we all should know about but too few do. Although I knew about the Battle of Dunkirk, the coverage of it in this book has in the same way made me want to find out more. I hope that this is the case with other people who have read the story. In my opinion the best books are the ones that keep you thinking after the last page has turned and this one certainly did that for me. I hope that many young people and older people alike get the opportunity to read this book. It's a story of true friendship, the best kind. Ruth Eastham has written one of the best debut children's books I have read in a long time. She is most definitely an author to watch.