Girl on the Fridge

by Etgar Keret

Book Overview

A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad--such are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374531056
• ISBN13: 9780374531058
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

"Girl on the Fridge" is an interesting and quirky read.

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.

Consistantly incredible

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.

not happy but fun stories

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.

Uneven, but mostly good

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.

Poignant, effective, topical, and raw

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."