The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories [Hardcover]

Etgar Keret (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0312261888 | ISBN-13: 978-0312261887 | Edition: 1st

Israel's hippest bestselling young writer today, Etgar Keret is part court jester, part literary crown prince, part national conscience. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God gathers his daring and provocative short stories for the first time in English.

Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

Bus Driver includes stories from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, Pipelines and Missing Kissinger, as well as Keret's major new novella, "Kneller's Happy Campers," a bitingly satirical yet wistful road trip set in the afterlife for suicides.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories stings and thrills with fierce fables of modern life. Set in landscapes ranging from "this armpit town outside Austin, Texas" to "this village in Uzbekistan that was built right smack at the mouth of Hell," these stories lay their plots' central tensions out plainly: "Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll," one begins. Then they take off like little roller coasters, careening through the pathos of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the clowning of David Sedaris's Barrel Fever, the in-your-face violence of Quentin Tarantino, and the bewildered alienation of Franz Kafka. But readers need not know any of Keret's sources to enjoy his stories fully. The Israeli writer's aphorisms leap off the page and lodge themselves in the mind: "There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed." Keret's vernacular prose is fun to read, and his vision of the world is weirdly comforting. Happiness never really flourishes, but small hopes and graces abound. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

In this collection of antic tales, Israeli writer Keret chronicles the bitter ironies that determine his characters' daily lives. Set in contemporary Israel, Keret's brief stories most are three to five pages long juxtapose a casual realism with regular flashes of unabashed absurdity, portraying characters on the brink of adulthood forced to confront life's chaotic forces death, justice, love, betrayal for the first time. Keret attempts to render often sad or tragic events with a light touch, and his plots lend a fantastical, whimsical air to simple, everyday reality: a bus driver is obsessed with keeping his schedule, a stewardess falls in love with a passenger, a man is befriended by an angel in disguise, a woman runs a convenience store at the gate to hell. The most successful stories capitalize on their brevity, their irony sharpening as the plot turns on a dime. "Cocked and Locked," for instance, portrays an Israeli and an Arab soldier in a desert standoff; a clever switch of identity reveals that the enemies we create are often born inside ourselves. But Keret's characters can be carelessly drawn, their shifts in sentiment seeming either flip or predictable, as in the story "Good Intentions," which focuses on a coldhearted killer's decision not to murder a good man. Similarly, the longest story, "Kneller's Happy Campers," which follows a young man on a quest for love in the afterlife, seems disjointed and bland after the charms of its conceit wear off. Without strong individuals, the stories here lose critical mass and remain too disparate to command attention as a collection.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (October 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261888
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261887
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Short Fiction from Israel, September 7, 2002

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (Hardcover)

Although wildly popular in his native Israel, this collection is the first of Keret's work to be published in the US. Two-thirds of the small book is given over to 22 equally small short stories, all ranging from 5-8 pages or so. These stories are difficult to characterize, although they generally feature alienated males (often children or teenagers), and the writing is universally deft and satirically witty with an underlying tone of irony and sorrow-occasionally drifting into unreality. Any description of them would not do them justice at all. I don't read enough American writers to think up a good comparison, although I would say Kerst shares some of Jonathan Lethem and Mark Jude Porier's territory. However, what the stories more similar to is some of the short fiction that came out of Scotland in the early to mid-'90s from people like Gordon Legge, Duncan McLean, and James Kelman, who also write very brief stories. Perhaps most of all, the book bears comparison to the absurdist fables of another Scot, Magnus Mills (All Quiet on the Orient Express, The Restraint of Beasts, Three To See The King). The novella which occupies the final third of the book, "Kneller's Happy Campers", about the afterlife of those who commit suicide, is especially redolent of Mills' odd and affecting mix of black humor and fantasy. The collection is drawn and translated from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, and one can only hope that more makes it into English and across the shores.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful and original., September 19, 2003

By 

Linda C. Gerhardt "degeneratemite" (MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (Hardcover)

Etgar Keret takes the term "short story" very literally. The majority of the stories don't exceed four pages. Keret doesn't engage in excessive prose, he doesn't devote much energy to setting a scene. He punches you on the nose with a story, then runs away. In the hands of any other author, this technique could be problematic: It doesn't allow the reader to truly know or care about his characters, and the only atmosphere present is the brevity of Keret's style. But it works because he is a very skilled storyteller, more concerned with walloping the reader over the head with a message and a purpose than taking the time to pull you into another world. Each story is a fable, a fairy tale. The short length and lack of detail can prove to be misleading--these are very complicated, well-thought out stories. They don't take long to read, but it does require time and brain-power to comprehend them.

A few stories fall flat. "Uterus," for instance. Sometimes I got the impression that something was lost in translation. But "The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God: & Other Stories" is a very satisfying collection, meaty in ideas if not physical heft.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, February 5, 2008

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M. Reyero - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories (Paperback)

I read this book in its Spanish translation before reading the English one -- they each read a bit differently but Keret's literary brilliance comes through in either: a forceful plunge into humanity's flaws.