Chroniclers of Pain

Zionism has been a phenomenal success. Over little more than half a century, Israel has achieved much - for the Jews. Meanwhile the condition of the Palestinians, who are subject to a brutal occupation and siege, deteriorates by the day, while the rulers of the world do nothing.

Jaqueline Rose in the Guardian looks to the country's fiction in an article called Chroniclers of Pain to see how authors such as Amos Oz, Orly Castel-Bloom, Yizhar, Etgar Keret, Emil Habibi have :

... acted as the nation's conscience, shattering the rhetoric of state.

This sounds so like something that Farish Noor would say, don't you think? :

All nations, as Ernest Renan famously stated, rely on forgetting or historical error (which is why, he adds, progress in historical knowledge can threaten national identity). They rely on stories that have to be forged out of a retreating past, reworking memory as they go.

Fiction can, and should, challenge that rhetoric.

Quirky Shorts

After reading that marathon of a Western and while slogging through the draft of a friend's novel, the book that is currently scratching my itch for a short and fun read is Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories which jumped into my hands the other day in Daunts.

Most of the stories are short-shorts, just a couple of pages long - snack length. Just right.

He reminds me so much of Murukami. His characters inhabit a universe where all the rules of nature can be broken - the inhabitants of hell are allowed out now and again for souvenir shopping in Uzbekistan, a man screams a wish into a hole in the wall and gains an angel for a friend, another makes a giant pipe into which he vanishes. (You can hear Etgar reading Pipes, here and there are plenty of other links to his work and downloadable stories on this site.)

Keret was born in 1967 and says his name translates as 'Urban challenge'. According to an interview in the Guardian, he began writing while in the Israeli Army where he wound up in an operation codenamed Quasimodo, working 48-hour shifts in front of a computer in an old underground atomic shelter.

He found in writing a way to release bits of himself that he denied and bottled up:

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.