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    The Seven Good Years
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    The Seven Good Years
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    The Seven Good Years
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    The Seven Good Years

    By Etgar Keret

    4/5

    ()

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    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS ‘BEST HUMOUR’

    A brilliant, hilarious memoir from a master storyteller

    Over the last seven years, Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born during a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became sick. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, touching ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds.
    The Seven Good Years is a tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms. Told in Keret’s inimitable style, this wise, witty memoir is full of wonder and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humour. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, it reveals the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.

    PRAISE FOR ETGAR KERET

    ‘Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His … short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.’ The New York Times

    ‘[Keret’s writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise and the fantastic … oblique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization and even summary.’ The Washington Post

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateJun 24, 2015
    ISBN9781925113624
    Unavailable
    The Seven Good Years
    Author

    Etgar Keret

    Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts. As screenwriters/ directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d’Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival. His books include The Nimrod Flipout and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door.

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    Reviews for The Seven Good Years

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      A collection of autobiographical essays about the seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father. I am a long-time fan of Keret's flash fiction because he manages to put such an infinite amount of emotion and characterization into a few pages that I find myself sometimes slightly breathless. These essays have elements of his fiction - most of them are "bigger on the inside" - but are not as fanciful, obviously, being technically non-fiction. Although I've read some of these essays before in various publications, the collection is very coherent and each essay is made better by its neighbor. Such a lovely, albeit bittersweet, book. The essays were written in Hebrew and translated into English, but the book itself has not been published in Israel in Hebrew - Keret says that it feels too personal.
    • 3/5
      This book is a collection of essays written by Israeli writer Keret covering the seven years beginning with the birth of his son and ending with the death of his father. I think I was expecting some meaningful and deep essays about life in Israel and what it means to be a Jew today. Instead, the book is for the most part a memoir of Keret's personal and professional life, frequently related in a "Dave Barry-ish" humorous way. Of course, since he is a Jew and an Israeli, these topics are touched upon, but for the most part not in any kind of depth. And since the essays collected in this issue were written over a period of years, and cover various topics, I didn't find that there was a clear unity in the book (often a problem for me with essay and short story collections). All of this sounds very negative, but I actually liked the book. The essays that stood out for me included the first, "Suddenly, the Same Thing," in which Keret discusses the birth of his son, which occurred at the same time as a terrorist attack:"I try to calm him down to convince him that there is nothing to worry about, that by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled: peace will come, there won't be any more terrorist attacks...." But, although his son is just a newborn, who are supposed to be naïve, "even he doesn't buy it."3 stars
    • 5/5
      Really delightful, amid the somehow horrible circumstances of bombings and general fear. And four translators probably helped to get it just right.
    • 5/5
      This is an excellent collection of short stories from a master storyteller. Poignant and humorous, it is also a window into life in Israel.
    • 5/5
      I don't consider writers to be "Favorite Authors" until I've especially enjoyed at least two books by them. This is my second by Keret, and click! -- he's been Favorite-d.My first was Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, his latest collection of flash fiction, which delighted me with surreal premises and imaginative twists. This book is a collection of 36 similarly short pieces, but here they're memoir-ish essays about the titular seven years between the birth of his son and the death of his father. They're not only poignantly optimistic, they're often outright funny.His observations from Tel Aviv on family -- his Holocaust-survivor parents, adored older brother and ultra-orthodox sister; his lioness wife and wise, tender young son -- stun me with their guy-next-door universality. They remind me of other writers whose landscape is family. But those others don't have stories of family road trips interrupted by air-raid sirens and the need to stop and lie at the side of the road until the bomb explodes, all the while distracting the frightened son by recasting the situation, Life-Is-Beautiful-like, as a game of "pastrami sandwich" where the child is protected between the adults.Plus, it's a treat to read Miranda July's Q&A with Keret in the opening pages. Considering they're two of the most unique writers I've encountered, I especially liked this from Keret:The best trait I got from my mother is her confidence. Not the kind of confidence that makes you lead the rebels' attack on the death star, but [...] that your choices, no matter how strange and different they may be, are perfectly all right. [...T]hat all those people around me who gave me good advice on how to be better [at being myself] were to be taken seriously, while all those who were simply asking me to [change] were to be ignored.I'm eager to read more of Keret's fiction, but now I yearn to read more of his memoir.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)