Our brains are hardwired for stories – from the moment we’re born we are told them, and as soon as we can speak we start telling them. Fairy tales, soap operas, romantic comedies, tragedies, 800-page Russian novels and 96-episode Netflix series – story abounds and surrounds us and much of it follows the same patterns. Aristotle was harping on about the importance of a good plot millennia ago and a lot of what he said has stayed with us. He liked stories to have a beginning, middle and end with every element building towards a whole. These elements have been taken apart and put back together in an infinite number of ways, but the parts remain the same and our familiarity with them has made us sophisticated navigators of narrative. We fill in the gaps. We jump ahead. We are, perhaps, more difficult to surprise than the ancient Greeks. But a good storyteller can take any situation, upset our expectations at every point and arrive at a conclusion that although wholly unexpected, feels like the only possible outcome.
Fly Already, by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, is a collection of 22 short stories, each one a surprise of its own. Translated from Hebrew, the book is Keret’s sixth story collection and the winner of the 2019 Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award.
In The Ladder a man gets to heaven but finds that it’s not what he had expected. In Pineapple Crush we meet a dope-smoking schoolteacher who seems to hate children. About half way through the book an email correspondence begins to punctuate the stories. A man writes to the caretaker of an escape room about bringing his grandmother for a visit. The caretaker refuses to accommodate them because he is closing the escape room for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tensions escalate over the course of their correspondence. But Keret’s favoured method of making the everyday strange is through dialogue. In Car Concentrate he writes, “a conversation is like a tunnel dug under the prison floor that you – patiently and painstakingly – scoop out with a spoon”.
Kristallnacht
Keret uses speech to carry us along. He recognises that dialogue is a kind of duet, a call and response. But again, he uses this idea to anticipate our reactions and upend them, sometimes with tragic consequences. In the title story Fly Already a man who is about to throw himself off a building mishears the response of the man trying to save him.
Two other stories stand out for what they manage to achieve in so few words. Yad Vashem tells the story of Eugene and Rachel, a couple on a visit to the World Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem. Eugene walks into a glass partition, a symbol of the invisible divide that separates European history before and after Kristallnacht.
Over the course of their tour of the museum Keret manages to unpack the story of the couple’s entire relationship. By the end they look the same but are irrevocably changed. A Japanese tourist witnessing Eugene’s tears tries to comfort him: “‘It’s awful,’ she said to Eugene with a heavy accent. ‘It’s awful what people are capable of doing to one another.’”
Completely alone
The book closes with a short, devastating coda. The Evolution of a Breakup is a potted history of evolution and civilisation that is at once personal and universal, and provides a powerful reminder of the singularity of our existence: “‘But can I just ask – why are you always talking in the plural?’ Instead of answering, ‘I just looked around and realised I was alone – I mean completely alone’.”
Throughout the collection there are stories within stories, there are stories about the nature of storytelling itself, and there are moments of speculative fiction. But there are no postmodern bells and whistles attached; nothing fanciful or clever gets in the way of the story itself. And in a world where our headlines read, “Trump tries to buy Greenland”, speculative fiction doesn’t seem so speculative anymore.
This book should be thrust into the hands of any infidel who has ever uttered the words, “I just don’t like short stories”. It has a completeness and aliveness and dare I say, accessibility, that makes it a great first venture for the uninitiated, and each five pages contain more action than most novels. This is writing characterised by generosity, where being generous doesn’t mean giving too much, but giving just the right amount.
