Flat pack furniture isn’t what immediately comes to mind when I think of Etgar Keret, the bestselling Israeli writer and filmmaker, who counts Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Safran Foer among his fans.
But as he sees it, his stories have something in common with assembling wardrobes or desks — they never turn out as intended.
“If I’m not surprised then it’s an indication that it’s not a good story,” explains Keret, whose work has been translated into 46 languages and who is one of a small number of Israeli writers to have experienced significant success outside his home country.
“A story has to be smarter than the person who has written it. The action of writing is like assembling Ikea furniture. You write something and say how the hell did this happen?”
In the titular story from his latest collection, Fly Already — about a suicidal man watched by a father and son from the street — the decision of the character to jump came as a shock. “I felt this kind of very heavy sadness, I was sure the guy was going to wait,” he explains.
Fly Already, awarded Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize, is a fascinating, witty collection, full of wry observations about contemporary Israel. There are stories about everything from the lengths people will go to score pot to one about a billionaire buying birthdays to alleviate his loneliness.
It’s Keret’s fifth collection; his backlist includes the story Kneller’s Happy Campers, about an afterlife specifically for suicide victims, which became the film Wristcutters. He has written graphic novels and a children’s book, while his screen work includes Jellyfish, which he directed alongside his wife Shira Geffen.
Keret’s fiction is darkly comic; he delivers few happily ever afters. “There is something about my stories that at the same time they are very, very sad and very optimistic,” says Keret.
“This combination makes perfect sense, because usually if you can imagine a better future then it is very sad when you don’t reach it. If you think this is as good as it gets then you have nothing to be sad about, you knew it was going to be bad in the first place.”
His outlook comes from being the child of Holocaust survivors (both his parents were born in Poland; his mother, who is now 86, was in the Warsaw Ghetto). “My father was one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever met,” he tells me.
“I asked how could somebody who went through the Holocaust be so optimistic. He said ‘when I was a kid life was hell, you couldn’t trust anybody. Then things got better and I still wait for things to get even better’.
"As a child this was a display in what storytelling is about. You don’t hide the harsh facts but you try to construct them so they will point upwards.”
Several stories in Fly Already deal with the legacy of the Holocaust; Tabula Rasa is a dystopian tale about revenge on Hitler; another comprises an exchange between an Escape Room proprietor and a survivor’s son, about whether his mother can visit the attraction on Yom HaShoah.
It is intended as a comment on the culture in Israel whereby “it seems the arguments are mostly about who suffered more”. In Israel, he says, you have a lot of suffering in a very small space “and that’s without even talking about the suffering of the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs”. But instead of creating some kind of collective support group “it becomes this Eurovision of suffering, where everyone tries to outdo the other.
“The danger in seeing yourself as victim is that it exempts you from taking responsibility for your actions. When you argue about who has suffered more, the best way to win is to shut this other person’s pain out.”
He cites arguments between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, in which the Holocaust is used as a trump card.
“The ultimate argument is you can’t compare [other people’s suffering] to the Holocaust but you don’t need to. My mother went through the Holocaust and when she cuts her finger it bleeds and hurts even though it cannot compare.”
Fly Already was eight years in the making, albeit with many other projects interspersed. He likens his writing process to a trust exercise. “I close my eyes, fall back and wait for the story to catch me,” he says. “It’s as if I’ve seen five seconds from a movie. I’m writing the stories as if I’m trying to get back to that channel.”
His most personal work is his 2015 memoir, Seven Good Years, which covers the birth of his son to his father’s passing. Now 13, his son hasn’t read it.
“He says when I write about him it’s basically some kind of attempt to communicate to other people something that exists between us” says Keret, sounding like any other father of a teenager. “He says ‘you are writing for people who didn’t see the movie, I am the movie’.”
In a few years, his son will likely join the army; in Seven Good Years Keret wrote about the mixed emotion of knowing your newborn will one day be a soldier, and his wife’s unhappiness about this. To Keret, army service is like paying taxes; something you do even if you dislike your country’s economic policy.
“The feeling that you can just excuse yourself doesn’t seem right,” he says. “But I can imagine him going and disagreeing with his commander for ethical or moral reasons and getting into trouble.”
Indeed, like many of Israeli’s cultural figures, Keret is no stranger to disagreeing with his leaders; he is full of opprobrium for Netanyahu, and is similarly critical of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. “In the past politicians tried to change the reality,” he sighs.
“Now the politicians try to change the agenda.” The media reports on politics as if we were in a reality show, “as if a good politician is a good candidate, able to create strong emotions in the viewers so they don’t go to a different channel”.
“With Johnson, with Trump and Netanyahu it’s a very strange mixture between the personal and the national.
“It’s very much the politics of kings,” he adds. “Johnson is the kind of guy who will always find something rude or politically incorrect to say, and if he is inconsistent about other issues then who cares? It’s love us or hate us but don’t judge us.”
With elections on the horizon in Israel for the second time this year, Keret is dismissive of the frontrunners.
“This talk about right and left wing is very empty, because it’s not as if they are two radically different views. The parties that oppose Netanyahu are parties are led by former chiefs of staff, they are not pot-smoking hippies going around saying they want to hug the Palestinians,” he says. “It’s all about a pragmatic discussion of how the conflict should be handled.”
He is frustrated that Israeli politicians are failing to confront bigger issues, such as discrimination against Arab citizens or gay rights, or whether Israel will be “first liberal and then Jewish or the other way round“, or even day-to-day challenges like hospital standards.
But he is resigned to this being the case. “The discourse Netanyahu leads is about survival and Iranians throwing bombs at us. If I was in his shoes [facing corruption allegations] I’d do exactly the same thing.”
When he does book events abroad he invariably faces questions about his country’s politics. “I’m being put in a position where an audience will ask me to defend a government decision that sometimes I feel it’s difficult to defend,” he says.
But coming from Israel “rather than say Italy and Switzerland” has advantages. “There is something about your presence that is loaded and interesting and appealing to the media. It’s not good for your life but it’s helpful to make your work more pertinent.”
His latest project is a television series filmed in France about a time-travelling estate agent; more story collections will almost certainly follow.
For Keret, writing is simply how he navigates the world. As a child, he would collect empty shells from his father’s army base and try to build something nice from them. That’s still his guiding motivation.
“There is something about writing that you take the harsh ingredients of your everyday life and try to make something beautiful out of it.”
Fly Already will be published by Granta Books on September 5. Etgar Keret will be speaking at the Southbank Centre on September 3.
