Autocorrect: Stories
At times, Keret can seem like that hip, cynical Gen X guy who’s down at the end of the bar doling out hot takes about the doomed future of our species ... The targets here (cruel game shows and people lost in virtual reality and A.I. companionship and time-travel conundrums and so forth) feel a bit played out, as though we’ve kind of already seen them in an episode of Black Mirror ... My favorite stories in the collection are the ones that—despite whatever tomfoolery is going on in the global monoculture—focus on the singular strangeness of being a living person in the world ... The tense and moving A Dog for a Dog features a group of Jewish children questing into an Arab neighborhood to seek revenge for the killing of their dog by a reckless driver—a quietly devastating tale of ethnic resentment and empathy ... Others hew to the universal and timeless. The touching title story is an attempt to rewrite the last words we say to someone.
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The novelist David Mitchell once said that a common element in great writing, as opposed to merely 'really, really good writing', is a sense of humour. The Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short stories certainly qualify on that count. He’s not always or even often trying to make you laugh, but everything he writes is suffused with a wan metaphysical wit: you come to expect the rug-pull, the sad trombone. He’s an absurdist, a surrealist, and a writer who revels in the way that in a few paragraphs you can take the reader anywhere ... The stories in Autocorrect...are gleaming splinters ... The story that will get most scrutiny, A Dog for a Dog [is] a delicately anticlimactic, perfectly balanced vignette, shadowed by violence as well as uneasy complicity in violence and collective punishment ... Yet for all its vast reach, Keret’s prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact ... Autocorrect isn’t so much a book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story.
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Wry, affectionate, tart storytelling with Keret’s trademark comic kick ... A bemusing clutch of comic vignettes alert to contemporary anxieties ... Not all of the 33 stories land ... But Keret still has an impressive success rate, finding places where the out-there premises sharpen our fears of loss and loneliness ... In its strongest moments, what resonates most aren’t Keret’s high-concept predicaments, but the determination of characters to preserve their humanity despite them.
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