Customer Reviews

The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

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

 

 

A great friend of mine loaned me this book saying is changed her. It had an amazing effect on me too. The book is written in very short stories, no more than a page or three at most. Each story is complete, explores an idea, an event, often with an unexpected component, not really a twist, just unexpected. The book is just the essence of stories. It's like a great red wine reduction ... flavorful, deep in color, hints of what could be a much bigger wine, but concentrated to accent your current mood.I think the first two stories: asthma and the marriage story stuck with me the most. The line in the first story goes something like this:
"When an asmatic 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."

This collection of short stories is very uneven in quality. The weak ones seem merely flippant, the strong ones remind me of prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire. My first impression after reading a couple of the stories was mostly negative. Upon finishing the book, I realized the power and beauty of the best ones greatly outweigh the flimsiness of the weak. Definitely worth reading.

Keret's stories are rarely happy, but they're fun. Their fluidity and lack of surface complications, plus the casual bits of surrealism, make them different in the best kind of way: they are different because of a unique simplicity, not because of a fatal dose of complexity and effort. The stories in "The Girl on the Fridge" aren't perfect, yet there are a handful that make the book well worth reading.
I look forward to reading Keret's other books.

I bought this book because I thought that several of the stories in Keret's book "The Nimrod Flipout" were truly incredible. Those stories, which were perfect gems, made a strong and lasting impression on me. They didn't just make me think. They were more than merely clever and odd. They hit me in the gut, in my emotional core.

Very few of the stories in "Girl on the Fridge" did that. But some of them did, and this book of stories is certainly worth reading. Still, many stories seemed frivolous, or merely odd, intelligent, or cleverly written. In my opinion, none was as good as the best stories from "The Nimrod Flipout."

"Girl on the Fridge" is a grab-bag. When Keret is good, he's excellent, but when he's not, reading can require a little effort. For me, the percentage of incredible stories wasn't quite high enough.

I don't want to put this book down too much! Keret is a superb writer, and, even when his stories didn't wow me, I was still impressed by how much he could accomplish in so few words. There are more than 40 stories in this book, each is only a few pages long, and a number of them still manage to pack quite a punch! And many of the rest, which didn't hit me as hard, were still quite clever and odd.

I certainly recommend you read Keret's other book: The Nimrod Flipout: Stories. I think it was better.

Etgar Keret is an amazing author and these short stories are a great example. It is a quick read and definitely worth the money!

The voice of the next generation? Please. If so the next generation is in more trouble than anyone in the previous generations has noticed yet. Too many of these short-shorts only read like Keret ran out of energy or imagination.

The few that work, like the very funny The Journey, the funnier Loquat, and, if possible the even better The Night The Buses Died, depend on some knowledge of Israeli culture. That figures. He's not writing for New York, even if one of the Big Six has anointed him a member of traditionally-published royalty. Probably for the violent stories, their favorite kind.

They also set the exorbitant price for the ebook, trying to shore up their cratering paper business model. And their gatekeeper status. Good luck with that.

There are a few other good, even inspired, stories here. Nothing, for instance, Happy Birthday to You, On the Nutritional Value of Dreams, Cheerful Colors, Boomerang, So Good and Knockoff Venus. Let's see, that's ten out of 46 stories, or 22 percent. Not enough to satisfy, but enough to try another, hopefully better, collection of Keret's work.

This collection is simply impossible to put down once you start. The stories are incredibly short and yet, rather than coming off as fragmentary, they are worlds unto themselves requiring a lot more time spent on thought than on reading.

These quirky stories are interesting, yet cleverly crafted.They seem like amusing little pieces, but they are much deeper, with lots of food for thought about violence and family life and love.

Keret has a powerful ability to craft profound stories in only one to three pages. Having read both The Bus Driver. . . and The Nimrod Flipout I was expecting more stories of the same quality. My expectations were met and I am extremely satisfied. Keret is a wonderfully gifted and imaginative author and his stories never cease to amaze, confuse, and obliterate your preconceived notions of literature and conventional society. I highly recommend this book, along with all of his other works.

My it is just me, but I honestly did not get any of the stories. I would read a few over and over again just to try and understand what the point or meaning was behind the story. I read the entire thing, I liked maybe 2 or 3 stories, the rest were over my head.