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    The Girl on the Fridge: Stories
    The Girl on the Fridge: Stories
    The Girl on the Fridge: Stories
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

    By Etgar Keret

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 15, 2008
    ISBN9781429933179
    The Girl on the Fridge: Stories
    Author

    Etgar Keret

    Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts. As screenwriters/ directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d’Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival. His books include The Nimrod Flipout and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door.

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    Reviews for The Girl on the Fridge

    3.5/5

    17 ratings9 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This is my second Keret collection I've read (The first being The Nimrod Flip-Out). Honestly, if you were to choose a Keret book to read for the first time, I would go with TNFO. The Girl on the Fridge was a fairly good collection of stories. Some of them are capable of giving you goosebumps, however others bore you so much that you continue reading just for the sake of finishing the story. However, Keret is a good writer as a whole with some beautiful prose (which may be a translator's touch, but probably not...). Keret is very in touch with human emotions and is great at conveying his meanings in very few words.
    • 3/5
      A collection of short stories translated from Hebrew. Some were bizarre, some were touching, but I enjoyed pretty much all of them. I wonder how much meaning was lost in translation. This is just something I wonder in general, because as I said, these stories still worked. I have another collection by Keret to read, and I'm eager to see if his style is consistently bizarre and amusing.
    • 4/5
      I bought this at Powell's in Chicago; my wife drove and I read a few stories aloud -- which isn't problematic as most of them were less than two pages and hilariously dry. I finished before we made it to Lafyette. I would read more of his work but have since grown immune to erratic impulses to flash effect.
    • 4/5
      A collection of very short stories about topics such as all the city buses dying, the dream eating monster under the bed, a magician who suddenly has to drop the rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick from his act, whether one should trust an artist and if finding a copy of Gulliver's Travels in Iceland is a lucky thing. Nearly all the stories are surreal, lengths range from a few paragraphs to three or four pages, and the writing is original to the point of true oddness. I'm looking forward to reading more from Keret.
    • 4/5
      I first saw Jellyfish, I think, which I liked a lot. Then I read Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, which I liked. Somewhere in the back where there is an interview she mentioned Keret (and they have worked together before.) And then I saw $9.99, which I also liked, though not as much as Jellyfish. So I decided I should read something by Keret, and The Girl on the Fridge was the first book I could get my hands on. I suppose what I did not expect was the horror aspect of the stories. The rest was familiar from the films I had seen.

      I kept thinking the stories reminded me of Gaiman's Sandman comics. Not the parts about Dream and his siblings (the Endless,) but the other parts, like the serial killers who meet up in a hotel, the girl who lives in the building with some bizarre characters, etc. So some horror, some mystery, some bizarre, and some political commentary. If Gaiman, Lynch, and Kafka got together and wrote a bunch of short stories that take place in Israel, this could very well be it.

      With that said, Keret does have that home advantage. His stories are very much culturally infused with Israel, the conflict, the everyday urban life. Some stories can easily reproduce the horror of war and conflict, the meaningless struggle. There is always some violence, whether it be a kid being bullied aside from the main story, an Arab being run over for fun by Israeli border patrol, or a severed head of a bunny. Most lead characters are male (if not all?) and most of them are not in charge of the situation. Things happen to them, and usually they suffer. Children have a special place in some of the stories, and they seem to live in the middle of a disturbing life, unaware.

      All in all, a pleasure to read, only if you like this kind of thing. If you enjoy the bizarre, the horrifying, the absurd, the surreal, you will enjoy these stories.
    • 1/5
      recommended by: Rachel DonovanMany readers seem to think this author is a genius and his stories are wonderful. Perhaps, but my opinion differs. They were not to my taste.This book has 171 pages and there are 46 stories; they’re obviously very short. Thankfully, for me, they were short and the book was short.As I read I had a sheet of paper handy with loved, liked a lot, and liked as categories, for writing down short stories that fit each one. The results?: none that I could wholeheartedly put on any of those lists, although there were many stories where I really liked parts of them and was able to appreciate the effort. Many of the story titles were intriguing so I was eager to try many of them.I felt assaulted by many of the stories. I disliked many of these enough to hopefully block them out of my memory and (only partially tongue in cheek) I’m hoping my memory has faded sufficiently that I won’t have much to contribute to my book club discussion in three weeks. I do like dark and disturbing books, including books that share some of the themes of these stories; I just didn’t enjoy this book. The worst of it is these stories didn’t even depress me or evoke any emotion, but left me mostly unmoved.If not for my book club I would have stopped reading very early on.I’m not saying these have no redeeming value and I don’t like discouraging others from reading books, even if I’m not a fan, so I say read the reviews written by other Goodreads’ members! However, I am a fan of the short story form and have often appreciated short stories that are very short, but not these. However, I am genuinely curious what my book club members think of this book and I’m eager to hear from those who enjoyed these stories in order to find out what they enjoyed about them.What I’m perturbed about is I’ve been eager to get my average rating for my Goodreads read shelf books back up to 4.00 from 3.99 because I do actually “really like” almost all the books I read. My uncharacteristic star rating of this book will significantly delay that shift.
    • 3/5
      I was really expecting to like this book better than I did. My previous (and first) Keret book was The Nimrod Flip-out which I liked much better. The story I liked the best in The Girl on the Fridge was "Super Glue" which tells about odd uses for superglue. I found "Loquat" a fun read as well. This short story was about a soldier whose grandmother commanded him to get annoying neighborhood kids out of their loquat tree. I found the other stories in this collection much too dark and disturbing. I do like the author's bizarre way of telling a story and looking at snippets of Israeli life, though. I will definitely read more books by Keret, but hope that some of the stories in future collections that I read will be lighter and more fun.
    • 5/5
      This collection is a little more uneven than The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God (because it's a compilation of older stories from the early 90s, rather than a collection conceived by Keret), but it does contain my personal favorite story of his: "Crazy Glue," which may be the best love story ever written (and it's only three pages long). Not to mention the shortest of the stories in the book ("Asthma Attack," which is 11 lines long), which has more heart than most novels I've read. When he's at his best, Keret's stories are on par with Borges at his best - when he's at his worst, on par with Borges at his worst (so still pretty darn good!).
    • 3/5
      This is my second Keret collection I've read (The first being The Nimrod Flip-Out). Honestly, if you were to choose a Keret book to read for the first time, I would go with TNFO. The Girl on the Fridge was a fairly good collection of stories. Some of them are capable of giving you goosebumps, however others bore you so much that you continue reading just for the sake of finishing the story. However, Keret is a good writer as a whole with some beautiful prose (which may be a translator's touch, but probably not...). Keret is very in touch with human emotions and is great at conveying his meanings in very few words.

    Book preview

    The Girl on the Fridge - Etgar Keret

    Asthma Attack

    When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones—those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says I love you, and when an asthmatic says I love you madly, there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

    Crazy Glue

    She said, Don’t touch it, and I asked, What is it?

    It’s glue, she said. Special glue. Superglue.

    And I asked: What did you buy that for?

    Because I need it, she said. I’ve got lots of things to glue together.

    There’s nothing that needs gluing together, I snapped. I can’t understand why you buy all this crap.

    The same reason I married you, she shot back, to kill time.

    I didn’t feel like getting into a fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she. Is it any good, this glue? I asked. She showed me the picture on the box, with this guy hanging upside down from the ceiling after someone had smeared some glue on the soles of his shoes.

    No glue can make a person stick like that, I said. They took the picture upside down. He’s standing on the floor. They just stuck a light fixture in the floor to make it look like a ceiling. You can tell right away by the way the window looks. They put the clasp on the blinds backwards. Take a look. I pointed at the window in the picture. She didn’t look. It’s eight already, I said, I’ve got to run. I picked up my briefcase and kissed her on the cheek. I’ll be back late. I’m—

    I know, she snapped. You’re swamped.

    I called Mindy from the office. I can’t make it today, I said. I’ve got to be home early.

    How come? Is anything the matter?

    No. I mean, yeah. I think she suspects something. There was a long silence. I could hear Mindy breathing on the other end.

    I don’t see why you stay with her, she whispered in the end. The two of you never do anything. You don’t even bother fighting anymore. I can’t figure out why you go on like this. I just don’t get what’s holding you together. I don’t get it, she said again. I simply don’t get it… and she started crying.

    Don’t cry, Mindy, I told her. Listen, I lied. Somebody just came in. I’ve got to go. I’ll come over tomorrow, promise. We’ll talk then.

    I got home early. I called out hello when I walked in the door, but there was no reply. I went from room to room. She wasn’t in any of them. On the kitchen table I found the tube of glue, completely empty. I tried to pull one of the chairs out, to sit down. It didn’t budge. I tried again. Stuck. She’d glued it to the floor. The fridge wouldn’t open. She’d glued it shut. I couldn’t see why she’d pull a stunt like this. She’d always seemed reasonably sane. This just wasn’t like her. I went into the living room to get the phone. I thought she might have gone to her mother’s. I couldn’t lift the receiver. She’d glued that down too. Furious, I kicked at the telephone table and almost broke my toe. The table didn’t budge.

    That’s when I heard her laughing. It was coming from up above me. I looked, and there she was, hanging upside down, her bare feet clinging to the high living room ceiling. I looked at her, stunned. What the fuck. Have you lost your mind? She didn’t answer, just smiled. Her smile seemed so natural, the way she was hanging, as if just her lips were subject to gravity. Don’t worry, I said. I’ll get you down, and I pulled some books off the shelf. I stacked up a few volumes of the encyclopedia and got on top of the pile. This may hurt a little, I said, trying to keep my balance. She went on smiling. I pulled as hard as I could, but nothing happened. Carefully, I climbed down. Don’t worry, I said. I’ll go to the neighbors to phone for help.

    Fine, she said and laughed. I’m not going anywhere. By then I was laughing too. She was so pretty, and so incongruous, hanging upside down from the ceiling that way. With her long hair dangling downward, and her breasts molded like two perfect teardrops under her white T-shirt. So pretty. I climbed back up onto the pile of books and kissed her. I felt her tongue on mine. The books slipped out from under my feet as I hung there in midair, not touching a thing, dangling from just her lips.

    Loquat

    "Go on, Henri, go talk to them. You’re a gendarme, they’ll listen to you."

    I put down my empty coffee cup and moved my feet around under the table, trying to find my slippers. "How many times do I have to explain it to you, Grandma? I’m not a gend—a policeman. I’m a soldier, a soldat. I don’t have anything to do with them, so why should they listen to what I have to say?"

    "Because you’re tall as a building and you wear a gendarme’s uniform—"

    "Soldat, Grandma."

    "So you’re a soldat, what’s the difference? You go to them with your pistolet and tell them that if they climb our loquat tree one more time, you’ll throw them in the calabouse and shoot them, or something, just so they stop coming into our yard…"

    Grandma’s faded eyes were moist now, and bloodshot. She really hated those kids. The old lady wasn’t all there, but out of respect I said okay. That evening, I heard them in the tree. I put on a pair of shorts and a sleeveless undershirt and told Grandma I was going out to talk to them.

    No, she said, blocking my way to the door, holding my ironed dress uniform. "You’re not going out to them like that. Put on your

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