Gaza Blues

Customer Reviews

• Not the Best Pairing  Jan 9, 2006 (12 of 13 found this helpful)

  The collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian writers is an attempt to provide some kind of example of creative peaceful coexistence without the identity politics than tends to run through a lot of Palestinian and Israeli literature. The two met at a literary conference, hit it off, kept in touch, and in response to the latest round of violence in 2002 decided to try and make some kind of unified statement. The result is a rather uneven volume, half of which is comprised of 15 of Keret's off-kilter microstories, which segue unevenly into El-Youssef's meandering and less satisfying novella.
  
  Ever since I read Keret's excellent U.S. debut, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, four years ago, I've been waiting for more. I was finally able to get a hold of this via an interlibrary loan and was a little let down to see that almost half of Keret's stories had also been in The Bus Driver... Fortunately, those I hadn't read were just as good as those I had. He's a very entertaining writer who reminds me partially of Jonathan Lethem, who writes about surreal characters in much the same way, and partially of some of the Scots writers from the '90s who wrote tons of captivating 2-4 page stories. Just to give you a taste, one of my favorite involves a bored housewife supergluing herself to the ceiling.
  
  El-Youssef's story about a hapless druggie Palestinian refugee in '80s Lebanon shows the mark of truth (El-Youssef was born in and grew up in such camps) and satire. Like all Palestinians, the protagonist is trying to escape his squalid existence in the camps, but he keeps getting derailed by his own weakness -- for drugs, for women, for tall tales. There are always grand plans and schemes that come to nothing. So, despite the avowedly apolitical and anti-identity politics aim of the book, it's hard not to believe that El-Youssef isn't making a very striking critique of his countrymen.
  
  Having lived in the region (including Lebanon and Israel), I applaud the book's aim of trying to forge connections and empathy between people who could certainly use it. As for literary merit, Keret's work is worth reading by anyone with a taste for distinctive short fiction while El-Youssef's tale is rather tepid and paced rather too slow in comparison.

• A journey into Keretland  Oct 19, 2004 (2 of 3 found this helpful)

  Keret's vision is unique, startling, funny, tragic. One is immediately transported in his tales to another dimension, where anything can happen, but there is nothing arbitrary about what does happen. Before you know it, you've had an intense experience, without quite understanding how. This is magical writing: controlled and wild, it reaches into the undercurrents of our perceptions and the world around us. The only genre classification I can think of is Keretian.