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‘It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …”
That’s quite the opener for a story, isn’t it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character’s ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he’s dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside “may he rest in peace”, we meet the author too.
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.
Where some authors will set vast cycles of fiction in a shared universe, Keret does the opposite. Every story is its own universe, and the 200-odd pages of each of his collections are a multiverse. The stories in Autocorrect, his seventh, are gleaming splinters: multum in parvo. He offers yelp-making casual swerves of perspective. “People, by the way, became extinct a short time later,” we’re told halfway through the last paragraph of one story – that flamboyantly casual “by the way” being very Keretian.
In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”
The opening story, A World Without Selfie Sticks, opens with the narrator describing self-reproachingly how he started yelling at a woman he thought was his girlfriend Deborah when he bumped into her in a coffee shop. Only a week previously, he explains, she had supposedly flown to Australia to do her doctorate – and here she was back in town without telling him. Of course he was angry and hurt. It turns out the woman he’s yelling at (Not-Deborah, he comes to call her) is a doppelganger from a near-identical alternative universe. She has been sent to our world as part of a top-rated TV gameshow: to win the show (and be zapped home) each of the five contestants must identify “the one thing that exists in their world but not the one they’ve been sent to” (the winner of the last series had been sent to a universe without selfie sticks). I shan’t spoil the twist, but it’s a love story and a philosophical what-if all at the same time.
The story that will get most scrutiny, A Dog for a Dog, describes the narrator and his brother heading into the Arabic quarter of an Israeli city for revenge after their dog is killed in a hit-and-run. Transposing Israeli-Palestinian hatred from a policy position to street level, it’s a delicately anticlimactic, perfectly balanced vignette, shadowed by violence as well as uneasy complicity in violence and collective punishment. Meanwhile, Strong Opinions on Burning Issues winks at the psychic temper of the times, and Outside refracts the experience of the Covid lockdowns into a surreal little parable. But these are literary responses rather than position statements. (And all but a couple of the stories were written before 7 October.) Politics is mostly absent, in a low-key rebuke to the philistine school of thought that says an Israeli artist should be obliged to make political art.
Other stories take us to different versions of the afterlife, or into a simulated reality where the introduction of an “undo” feature – spill your coffee, you can set the universe back 30 seconds – poses an existential threat. Director’s Cut is a real-time biopic of an ordinary man with a 73-year running time; the press screening at once winks at Plato’s cave (the only person who doesn’t die of old age emerges thinking the film was reality) and Borges’s 1-1 scale map. There’s a world not that far from our own, where AI companions are proposed to cure loneliness; and one where time travel only takes off when it’s rebranded as a weight-loss treatment.
Yet for all its vast reach, Keret’s prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact. It’s full of people negotiating the bewildering and alienating and bathetic furniture of modernity: Tinder dates, Zoom calls, Skype meetings, virtual reality, small ads, tedious queues, spoiler alerts, unexpected deaths. 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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