Customer Reviews

Jetlag

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Etgar Keret, you're the most promising fortyish writer in Israel and you just love working in comics too. Your skills at farce and a Charles Schultz wistful sadsackness give your stories a lovesick, hovering, numinous quality like dark clouds over a child's tea party. In JETLAG FIVE GRAPHIC NOVELLAS you really take the word "novellas" and give it a new meaning, that is, you make it mean something brief and haiku like, when in ordinary English I expect it to mean something long. Comics have their own Orwellian newspeak but to dignify these sketches with the name of novellas would have Henry James, not to mention Isaac Balshevis Singer, rolling in their graves.

Etgar Keret, youe collaborators on JETLAG all belong to a collective called ACTUS, but their drawing styles could not be any different. Rutu Modan, who illustrates the final "novella," has a classic European clarity and the last panel, of your hero alone with his pet monkey on a seaside amusement pier, is like a panel from some lost Tintin adventure by Herge. Itzik Rennert, on the other hand, dazzles things up with a George Grosz meets Basquiat (or John Bankston) satiric crudeness of gesture and line: big thick sharpie strokes and a pornographic river of debauchery. As an Anerican boy growing up in France I used to try to imitate the line drawings in the books of erotica I found on the top shelves of my elderly professor's directoire, and if I had had three hands I might have been able to come up with something like this. Mira Friedmann is working the ominous shadows overmuch (granted when the story if called "Passage to Hell" that's a mighty big temptation) and one of your other Actus people can't really draw at all, might it be one of your relations trying to break into the big time on your dime?

I enjoyed the book but found it trifling compared to your other current projects. You don't have a really big imagination, do you, Etgar Keret? Sounds like the same thing over and over again. Folktales with an edge.