The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
This is an utterly fantastic collection. I've long been meaning to read some Keret and am so glad that I've finally gotten here. He's capable of doing one of the most challenging things in writing with surprising ease and agility: humor. And not just a smile, but pure laughter, rising on accident, despite suppression and embarrassment at being in public with a bus full of people who don't speak your language.He gets there through situations. It's not a single sentence that makes you laugh, not a one liner kind of thing, but these absurd circumstances and situations that reach this point where nothing can hold back the laughter, especially not the sadness of the characters. And this, I think, is what makes his writing so impressive. He's not the kind of writer who blows you away with a sublime sentence or even with a singular moment of shocking insight, but he knocks you over laughing, always on the razor, tightroping between tragedy and comedy.While these are certainly funny stories, there's so much more to them than funny moments. And though he never tries to capture a life in a single sentence the way so many others do, he reflects life in all its absurd surreality with almost disgusting ease and insight. I believe that all writers have something small inside them that's the impetus behind the art. It may be a scene or a sentence or a moment, but it's there, I think, always, the heart beating in the floor. The humor here, to me, is not a mask, but a lens. It's the prism through which Keret comes to understand the world, in all its bizarreness. Though the stories are rather short, the characters are the type that tumble off the page, sit beside you when you forget to look. And there's a deep sadness in all these stories, characters on the brink of existential crises, imbued with ennui, lost, aimless. These characters are drifters without the drift, locked in stasis. It is this unbearable lightness of being, to steal a phrase and misappropriate it, that's at the heart of these stories, and why the humor is so essential. These characters are not choosing to keep going, to keep walking despite the pain and the suffering, but just keep going because it seems just as hard to stop, maybe even harder. They accept things, not through rationalisation or through choice, but simply because this new thing is there and to change it is more difficult than to kind of shrug at make room for it.There's this feeling that ennui comes and goes with young adulthood, but these characters persist at this stage in life, whether they're thirty or fifty. They're caught, unaware of even the trap, and somehow the humor piles around them even as they sink deeper into the mire. These characters are not funny people. They do not make one another laugh, and, I think, it's what makes their absurd lives so funny, even when it surprises you how funny you're finding it.Along with that, there are real tender moments of beauty. The love of a dog, the life of a house, and my favorite: telling a story only to reach a single moment. That last one is summarised by a line within it:--For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.--It's as if he wrote the whole of the story only to reach that line, and, once reached, the story had to end. And it's beautiful in its simplicity, in its purity, in its longing. I wrote this story for you because I imagined your kiss, just as the character watches the other for three months only imagining a single kiss.But, yes, off to track off everything he's written. Highly recommended.--A dream is nothing but a strong wish. So strong that you can't even put it into words.--
after reading: Right, here's the thing about short stories: I just don't like them. And here's why: short stories (like long stories) are either good –- and you wonder why the writer didn't just keep writing because now you are really interested in these characters/this scenario/the voice/whatever –- or they're not good, and you wonder why you wasted your time.I definitely put Etgar in the former category. Many of these stories are really good! Super good! But this is the thing: if Etgar can write a hundred tiny stories about love and sex and infidelity and dogs and the army and vague international business dealings and Israel and taxis and death and people who are confused and sad and having lots of sex and betrayed and betraying and otherwise just fucked up -- if Etgar can write a million of these tiny stories, why can't he instead (or also) write one big story? Or a few medium-sized stories? Because all through this book, just when I was starting to sink my teeth in, falling backward into a cool new tale, really giving myself over to a new story-world -- it was over. And then I'd have to get myself all re-worked back in, settling down into another cool and interesting situation with fairly similar characters and more or less the same emotional content, and by the time I'd gotten into that one, well, the rest doesn't need to be said again.mid-read: This isn't the book I'm supposed to be reading next, but I just sorta grabbed it on my way out the door to smoke, and noticed that the stories are super short (about cigarette-length, as it happens), and so I read "Glittery Eyes" (because who can resist a title like that?) and jeez. It was really sad! And really really affecting, especially for just a four-page-long little wisp of a story. Looks like me and Etgar are going to get along swimmingly.before reading: When all the cool kids are talking about the same weird book with the same bizarre title and mildly disturbing cover, a girl has to pay attention.
What do You think about The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (2006)?
Like a box of chocolate truffles, each bite sized, complex, and mouthwateringI am at a loss for how to describe Etgar Keret’s work to those who’ve yet to have the pleasure. To comment merely on his stories brevity – the longest I believe comes in at perhaps eight pages and thirty fill this slim volume – would make him seem too much the trickster, a writer with a gag instead of the extraordinary story teller one will meet in “The Nimrod Flipout.” Perhaps instead I might offer examples of a few of his topics – a man falls into an existential crisis when he wakes to find his beloved dog licking his morning erecting; a character is obsessed with a kiss his girl friend had long ago; the most average of men finds extraordinary success in the most average of ways begging the reader to ask why haven’t they – but no, simply going through the stories one by one seems almost voyeuristic.Not to sound too Forest Gump-esque, but Keret’s collection resembles nothing so much as a box of varied chocolate truffles, each bit sized, each unique, each extraordinary in its own right, even if it doesn’t meet your particular taste. Life may not be like a collection of Etgar Keret short stories, but the world be better off if more reading experiences were.Highly recommended.
—jordan
I hate to be lazy and quote a critic’s review of a book I just read, but it’s this or nothing. Anyway, Joseph Weisberg in the newest NYT Book Review critiques Keret’s “latest” collection (early work recently released in the US), “The Girl on the Fridge.” Near the end of his review Weisberg states, “If you haven’t read Keret, start with his 2006 collection, “The Nimrod Flipout.” It shows him more fully in command, better able to connect his style to the emotion that lies beneath.” Having only read this book, I find it almost hypocritical that I agree with him. (Is “hypocritical” the right word?)Weisberg touches upon Keret’s Israeli roots (his collections are translated), which I feel are almost entirely unrelated to the work, or rather unimportant to the work. (No boos or hisses here please.) I think Keret’s “surreal” stories step outside of Israeli life, are bigger than Israeli life, and sometimes step even beyond that. Another point Weisberg brings up, a technical issue really, is that the stories are characteristically around 3 pages each. I love this. I don’t know the short story form very well, but I think Keret’s stories are of a perfectly formed length, a sort of prose poetry-suffused mini-novella, if there is such a thing.I highly recommend this collection. Really.
—brian tanabe
I both did and did not like this book. I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy viewing abstract/avant-garde art - the premises and twists and turns in these short stories are so off-the-wall they open your mind in different directions, and that's usually a good thing. However, more often than not, these extremely short stories (typically no more than 3 pages long) depend upon some perversion as their hook, which gets boring and predictable. In many cases, a story starts out solidly with an almost tangible setting and 3-D characters but then veers off dramatically in some absurd way. You can usually point to the exact sentence where Keret has decided to blow the whole thing up by yanking the steering wheel and driving wildly off course. It's jarring and unnatural, which is a shame because he really can write well. The best way I can sum up reading each of these stories is that it's like paying a dollar at the circus for a 60-second viewing of one of their 'human oddities' - you're drawn in by the hawker's pitch, then utterly disappointed by the inauthentic experience, but only mildly disappointed in the end because you didn't pay that much and it didn't waste that much of your time. However, do that 30 times in a row . . . and you DO feel like you've paid too much and wasted your time.
—Cheri
