Customer Reviews

The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are many fantastic short stories in this collection, _The Nimrod Flipout_, by Israeli author Etgar Keret. There are also many that are reminiscent of first drafts from a night-school creative writing class. When he's good, Keret is a fantastic new talent, full of humor and existential angst, but when he's not - he's trite, cliche, and boring - one more young guy writing about getting stoned and laid.

The titular story "The Nimrod Flipout", is one of the best in the entire collection. Three young men are possessed, in turn, by the spirit of their friend, Nimrod, who killed himself after his girlfriend broke up with him. [Variety is also not Keret's strong suit. There are at least two other stories where someone kills themselves because they've been dumped.] After the narrator, the last to succumb to the spirit of his deceased friend, the possession repeats itself starting over again with Miron, the first to be possessed. It's a touching story about the frivolity of youth, and deeply tragic, as well; its also one of the funniest stories in the collection.

"Fatso", the opening story, I also loved. It is about a guy whose girlfriend turns into a fat, drunk, soccer-loving man after the sun goes down, and how, after spending many nights going out and watching soccer at the bar with this character, he begins to love his girlfriend, too.

This collection has its shining moments, and is highly recommended to fans of short fiction. However, don't be surprised if some of the stories dissapoint.

Some of these stories are brilliant, first round knockouts. Others are shtick-yawns. The best are like the wondrous short-short stories of Spencer Holst. The worst are whines from the slacker you'd never listen to for five minutes if you bumped into them at a bar. Buy the book for the wonderful, but expect a very mixed bag.

Who knew the Magical Realist mantle would end up in Tel Aviv? (There's no better place for it!) This is a somewhat uneven collection of short stories, thus the missing star. However, it's extremely rare to find a short story collection where that isn't the case.

Maybe he gets half a star back, and rounded up to the nearest star, because most of these tiny fables are incredibly good. Several are snort-wine-out-your-nose funny, some are perfectly sly, and others are sweet or poignant without sentimentality. A few lumber along unfulfilled, but just a few. (And they're really short.)

He's very a fine writer even in translation, with clear eyes and no fear.

This book is a bit of a grab bag. It's a jumble of great and not-so-great stories, and you take what you get.

Some of the stories are absolutely fantastic, creative, evocative, and perfectly told. Often, these excellent stories elicited strong reactions from me, or made me smile at their strange, wonderful, and twisted genius. The first story of the book, "Fatso," is such a gem of a story (in structure, in its strangeness, in style, in images, in character, in a surprising dose of magical realism) that, in addition to reading it four or five times, I'm also going to photocopy it, and send it to two friends. I think they'll find it excellent as well.

Other stories are not nearly as good.

But, after reading several of the other Amazon reviews of this book, I wonder: perhaps all of the stories are incredible, and some just appeal to different kinds of people from others. Several reviewers and readers seem to agree that this book has some excellent and some not-so-excellent stories, but do they all agree about which are which? I saw that at least one reviewer really appreciated the book's title story "The Nimrod Flipout." But this was one of the stories with which I was thoroughly UN-impressed. It didn't move or excite me, and the writing didn't seem all that compelling. On the other hand, I absolutely loved "Halibut" - it is one of my favorite stories of all time. Each of the occurrences it describes is brilliantly timed, and the whole thing fits together in a brilliantly peculiar way. But, I wonder, did everyone else think that this story was excellent? I don't know.

So maybe all of the stories are excellent, and some appeal to people like me, and others appeal to different people. It seems possible. I'd be curious to know what other people think.

"The Nimrod Flipout" is a collection of extremely short stories. There are thirty that span only 160 pages. For this reason, it's easy to forgive the hit-and-miss nature of TNF, and of microfiction in general. There's very little time or energy to be invested, so if the story doesn't pan out, it's no big loss, and there are plenty of other options in the book.

As I read through Flipout, I made notes on the stories I was particularly fond of, at the end, I ended up with a list of 10. "Fatso," "Your Man," "Surprise Egg," "Glittery Eyes," "A Thought in the Shape of a Story," "Gur's Theory of Boredom," "Bwoken," "Ironclad Rules," "A Good Looking Couple," and "Angle." They range from insightful, to funny, to emotionally moving. The other twenty stories included here were just icing on the cake.

Keret's pacing is very impressive, and everything moves forward at a brisk pace. Nothing important omitted, nothing needless retained. A worthwhile read, definitely.

The word "edgy" came to mind as I quickly read these 30 very short short stories by this young Israeli writer. He has a unique point of view and speaks in a voice all his own. All of these stories are surreal and weird. Some are funny, some are sad and all of them are infused with a particularly Israeli adolescent male's point of view. Themes such as suicide, mental illness, death, infidelity and loyalty of dogs and out-of-control relationships all come together in this eclectic mixture of short stories.

This author certainly has a twisted mind and I was always surprised at his creativity. The stories made me uncomfortable even though I was aware that the writer had complete control of his craft and was trying to say something. Because I was reading this book as an assignment for a book discussion group I forced myself to finish it. I found it also refreshing to see how this author's mind worked.

I definitely recommend this book for those readers like me who look for something unique and different. It is a skewed view of the world that is not always pleasant. But, honestly, I hated every minute of it.

Etgar Keret is nothing more (or less) than the Etgar Keret of Israeli literature. His style in many ways is unique and should be read with no one else in mind. Like many Israelis, he lives life with a cynical approach that is very much like 'gallows' humor. This derives from the birth pangs of Israel, the elegiac weight of the Shoah (Holocaust) and the knowledge of being surrounded by 160 million people who want you gone and dead.

Spend any time in Israel or with Israelis and you will understand a little more the eccentricities of Keret's stories. Especially touching and revealing is his discussions of being part of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Most of his comments about life in the IDF are sidebars to the actual story he is telling, but they are not 'throw-away' comments.

His stories wander all around the spectrum, though many are 'train of thought' or just 'I was thinking about...'. His take on what makes a relationship would bring one to think that he hasn't been very successful and doesn't think he ever will be.

My favorite was "$9.99 plus tax and shipping". The story itself could be too 'cutsie' but the ending is pure Keret.

Zeb Kantrowitz (and I approved this review)

Short stories that run from page- to chapter- length offer giggles, snickers, thought-provocation, a skewered lens on young adult humanity's strangenesses, as written from the point of view of a sort of anthropologically objective, but rather warped, insider.

I've asked my local library to purchase ALL of Etgar Keret's published works, and plan to do the same for my personal collection. These stories are often laugh-out-loud and read-aloud weird and wonderful - like wasabi peanuts, they have zing and crunch - and leave me wanting more!

Keret commands a powerful cast of completely three dimensional individuals who manage to navigate with varying degrees of success the ridiculous, hilarious, and heart-breaking events that come flying at them. These stories in many ways feel like fractured fairy tales like the story of the boy with the shrinking parents, the were-wolf-esque girlfriend, and the titular flipout episode. In just a dozen or so pages, fewer in some cases, Keret drops us into the lives of characters who through their speech and actions feel real and familiar, and then just as quickly we are jettisoned from their story whether it was resolved or not, giving a "win some, lose some" attitude that bespeaks of reality. A thankful nod to the translators Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston who lend their talents and mastery of English dialects and idioms to bring us English speakers a powerful, strange, amazing set of modern-day tales.
Worth your time.

I am at a loss for how to describe Etgar Keret's work to those who've yet to have the pleasure. To comment merely on his stories brevity - the longest I believe comes in at perhaps eight pages and thirty fill this slim volume - would make him seem too much the trickster, a writer with a gag instead of the extraordinary story teller one will meet in "The Nimrod Flipout." Perhaps instead I might offer examples of a few of his topics - a man falls into an existential crisis when he wakes to find his beloved dog licking his morning erecting; a character is obsessed with a kiss his girl friend had long ago; the most average of men finds extraordinary success in the most average of ways begging the reader to ask why haven't they - but no, simply going through the stories one by one seems almost voyeuristic.

Not to sound too Forest Gump-esque, but Keret's collection resembles nothing so much as a box of varied chocolate truffles, each bit sized, each unique, each extraordinary in its own right, even if it doesn't meet your particular taste. Life may not be like a collection of Etgar Keret short stories, but the world be better off if more reading experiences were.

Highly recommended.