Missing Kissinger is a second book by

Etgar Keret Etgar Keret ( he, אתגר קרת, born August 20, 1967) is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. Personal life Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third child ...

Content

The book is an

anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically categ ...

of surreal ambiguous and very

short stories A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest t ...

. Stories are about 5 pages long, presented in laconic sentences with use of intentionally spare, antiliterary vocabulary. About fifty stories span two hundred and fifty pages. The protagonists are

Average Joe The terms average Joe, ordinary Joe, Joe Sixpack, Joe Lunchbucket, Joe Snuffy, Joe Blow, Joe Schmo (for males) and ordinary Jane, average Jane, and plain Jane (for females), are used primarily in North America to refer to a completely average p ...

s " taking impossible things seriously and grave matters lightly". Keret says: "I would call it subjective realism, I am trying to show things the way they feel." Keret explains that his work is influenced by

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...

: "Kafka tries to reach his moral goal by disorientating the reader. A short story in this style is like a slap in the face."

Reception

The book was a popular success and considered author's breakthrough creation. The daily newspaper

Yedioth Ahronoth ''Yedioth Ahronoth'' ( he, יְדִיעוֹת אַחֲרוֹנוֹת, ; lit. ''Latest News'') is a national daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv, Israel. Founded in 1939 in British Mandatory Palestine, ''Yedioth Ahronoth'' is the largest paid n ...

named the book as one of the 50 most important works in Hebrew. Stories from this book are now included on the Israeli high school syllabus. A review of ''Missing Kissinger'' by Todd McEwen describes Etgar Keret's locale as that of "male confusion, loneliness, blundering, bellowing and, above all, stasis. His narrator is trapped in an angry masculine wistfulness which is awful to behold in its masturbatory disconnection from the world's real possibilities and pleasures." Etgar is "not much of a stylist - you get the impression that he throws three or four of these stories off on the bus to work every morning," and his "wild, blackly inventive pieces...might have been dreamed up by a mad scientist rather than a writer."

References

External links

Magic & childhood
by

- ''Three tales of innocence from Israel'' 1994 short story collections Israeli short story collections Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir books {{1990s-novel-stub