Customer Reviews

Gaza Blues

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian writers is an attempt to provide some kind of example of creative peaceful coexistence without the identity politics than tends to run through a lot of Palestinian and Israeli literature. The two met at a literary conference, hit it off, kept in touch, and in response to the latest round of violence in 2002 decided to try and make some kind of unified statement. The result is a rather uneven volume, half of which is comprised of 15 of Keret's off-kilter microstories, which segue unevenly into El-Youssef's meandering and less satisfying novella.

Ever since I read Keret's excellent U.S. debut, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, four years ago, I've been waiting for more. I was finally able to get a hold of this via an interlibrary loan and was a little let down to see that almost half of Keret's stories had also been in The Bus Driver... Fortunately, those I hadn't read were just as good as those I had. He's a very entertaining writer who reminds me partially of Jonathan Lethem, who writes about surreal characters in much the same way, and partially of some of the Scots writers from the '90s who wrote tons of captivating 2-4 page stories. Just to give you a taste, one of my favorite involves a bored housewife supergluing herself to the ceiling.

El-Youssef's story about a hapless druggie Palestinian refugee in '80s Lebanon shows the mark of truth (El-Youssef was born in and grew up in such camps) and satire. Like all Palestinians, the protagonist is trying to escape his squalid existence in the camps, but he keeps getting derailed by his own weakness -- for drugs, for women, for tall tales. There are always grand plans and schemes that come to nothing. So, despite the avowedly apolitical and anti-identity politics aim of the book, it's hard not to believe that El-Youssef isn't making a very striking critique of his countrymen.

Having lived in the region (including Lebanon and Israel), I applaud the book's aim of trying to forge connections and empathy between people who could certainly use it. As for literary merit, Keret's work is worth reading by anyone with a taste for distinctive short fiction while El-Youssef's tale is rather tepid and paced rather too slow in comparison.

The political statement of this little volume is inspiring: a book of short fiction written jointly by one of Israel's leading authors (Keret) and a Palestinian living in exile (El-Youssef). The book itself is difficult to obtain at a reasonable price, but fortunately Keret is as prolific as he is brilliant and several other collections are listed on Amazon: THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE, THE BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD, FOUR STORIES -- and, less readily, two of the volumes from which the stories in GAZA BLUES were taken: MISSING KISSINGER and KNELLER'S HAPPY CAMPERS. El-Youssef, who now writes from London, is represented on Amazon only by his novella THE ILLUSION OF RETURN; he is an author whom I can respect more than enjoy.

I was a little disappointed to discover that in the book itself, the work of the two authors abutted but did not intermingle. Fifteen fragments by Keret, mostly very short, are followed by a single long story by El-Youssef; about sixty printed pages in all are devoted to each writer. They share a similarly manic vision, with a tendency towards the surreal. Keret's stories are all oblique; only the very short title story and a few others deal directly with the reality of living in a divided land, but whether by deliberate selection or as the result of being published in this context, all of them seem to reflect the underlying violence of life in Israel today. El-Youssef's story, "The Day the Beast Got Thirsty," is set in and around a refugee camp in Lebanon, where the author himself grew up. His style reminds me a little of Joseph Heller's in CATCH-22, as his protagonist, mostly half-stoned, wanders around making deals with one shady operator to obtain a travel visa, talking to another about whether symbolism or realism is the correct medium for a Drama to Advance the Cause, pursuing a girl he calls ugly but sleeps with anyhow, weaving in and out of fighting between the various factions, and avoiding the security apparatus. I'm sure it is a perfect distillation of the futility of life in exile, but it makes rather amorphous reading.

Keret's stories, by contrast, are like sparks from a bonfire, brilliant and potentially lethal. In some, violence is close to the surface. A woman telescopes an entire history of outrage and isolation into a recurrent nightmare while she is racked with cramps. The timid son of the Head of the Mossad, bullied at school, takes revenge in his own way. Two stories contain a family dog that attacks other people and has to be killed. Other tales deal with isolation and retreat: a wife gets back on her husband by sticking everything in the apartment down with crazy glue; a soldier seals himself up in a vacuum pack; a factory worker makes a twisted pipe that becomes a wormhole to heaven. Perhaps my favorite story, though, is a true one: a 32-year-old woman killed by a suicide bomber who is found on autopsy to have had a cancer so pervasive that it would have killed her within weeks anyway. "What is cancer," the pathologist thinks, "if not a terrorist attack from above?" It is a rare moment of simple tragic truth. Otherwise, from both authors, what you get is bizarre manic laughter; it may not be any answer, but it is at least a passport through the pain. [Keret 5 stars; El-Youssef 3]

Keret's vision is unique, startling, funny, tragic. One is immediately transported in his tales to another dimension, where anything can happen, but there is nothing arbitrary about what does happen. Before you know it, you've had an intense experience, without quite understanding how. This is magical writing: controlled and wild, it reaches into the undercurrents of our perceptions and the world around us. The only genre classification I can think of is Keretian.