Etgar Keret interviewed by Mikael Awake

First published in Salt Hill 22 (2009).

Interviewer’s Note: Etgar Keret, the writer/filmmaker, with his penchant for terseness, gore, and crushing sadness, and his intimidating proficiency in at least three media, does not prepare one for Etgar Keret, the interview subject, with his drowsy smile, inviting garrulousness (our interview has to be at least four times as long as most of his stories), giddy anecdotes about his son, and the tendency to lean in confidingly in response to even the worst of questions. Keret and I conducted the following interview one chilly morning this fall in the lobby of his hotel, right as he was to embark on a 2-week, coast-to-coast reading tour. The man whom Salman Rushdie has called “the voice of the next generation” kept his luggage at a safe distance as we discussed such sundry topics as writing naked, his plummeting pension, kicking walking canes out from under the elderly, and the tyranny of “The Well-Written Story.”

Salt Hill: I was struck by this idea of your stories coming out of the subconscious, and what it meant in terms of your response to the stories. What’s the difference between a successful story and a failed one?

Etgar Keret: I think there are a few parameters by which I judge a story, but the first and most important one is sincerity. Because sometimes when you write stories you want to dress, you want to look smarter than you are, you want to be funnier, or funny for the sake of being funny, and the moment that you read something and say, “That’s not me. That’s not what I’m feeling,” then it’s a failed story.

After that you just ask yourself, “Okay, so there’s honesty in this story, is it interesting in any way? Does it say something maybe that I didn’t know? Does it show things in a different way than I thought it would?” And—it’s not the only way to write a story—but I always like it when I write a story that I think will get my reader a little bit off balance. Make him less certain of things he was certain of before. I think there is something moral about admitting your own confusion or the limited knowledge that you have. So in that sense, I almost kind of have this Platonic conviction of going to my reader and saying, “Hey, you think you know things? I actually think you know less.” So, I think it’s a combination of all these things: trying to be honest, trying to get your reader off balance, and saying things that are not obvious.

SH: Speaking of parameters, you’ve said before that you don’t like to “close doors” in your stories, which I take to mean that you don’t offer certain details in a story that will close imaginative doors. For example, naming a character closes a door in the reader’s mind on all the other possible names that the character could have. Are there other similar “don’t close doors”-type guidelines you have?

EK: When I write something, I always look at it, and after writing it, I say, “Do I really need it?” Because many times, you write to build speed, to generate things. The stories that I write are usually sixty percent of the length of what I’ve actually written. Usually, I would say one out of every two stories I write, I lose the beginning. I lose the opening paragraph. I wrote it because I needed it to get started, but I don’t need it.

Most of my stories, I lose a big chunk in the middle, because many times you go on these detours to find your way. Just when I finish a paragraph—sometimes you just go forward with the story —but if I finish a paragraph, I make myself coffee, I get back to it, and I always take one sentence out. I have a lot of patience, let’s say, as a person; I have no patience at all as a reader—as a reader of my own texts especially. So when I read something I’ll keep saying, “Why the hell did I need that? Why did I put it there?” And usually the answers to these are not rational. Many times, if you ask me why I have this sentence, I can’t tell you why.

There is something very stressed and full of anxiety in my deep perspective of life, and if I can draw on this for metaphor, I could say it’s like a sinking ship and I keep throwing things overboard so it will stay afloat. And basically for me the story is more like a direction
or a movement than substance. Maybe it’s not a sinking ship: it’s just a ship where you throw things away so that you can build speed. It’s not about buying myself a piano or fridge. It’s about where I’m heading. If I had to pantomime my stories it’s always like [makes
swatting gesture] getting things out of the way. It’s not inspecting them. It’s not checking them. It’s about getting there. For me when I
write, there is this feeling of urgency. It’s just kind of like going down into the subway at rush hour and you’re in a hurry. It’s not about
description; it’s not about anything. It’s about getting there.

You know, it’s impossible for me to write when there are people around me. The few situations when there were people around me,
they were actually stressed based on my…

SH: …Really? Is it a physical thing?

EK: Yeah, I talk to myself. I walk around. Most of the time, I write naked.

SH: No way.

EK: …in my underwear. My wife thinks I’m a little bit crazy. I talk to myself, you know, I laugh, I hit the wall. I lose a bit of my self-awareness. It’s like I’m somewhere else. If I were to take my pulse while I’m writing, it would be really, really fast. I have this feeling that something is trying to escape me. I don’t know. It’s like if you try to catch this butterfly—going on a route is not necessary—and
this butterfly you’re trying to catch is inherently uncatchable. There’s something transcendent about it. I think writing is this process of trying to catch it, trying and failing. But because it’s all about catching it, it’s all about this focus, being focused on this thing. I don’t think that there’s one story I’ve written in my life where I’ve actually caught it. But when you get closer, you really don’t want anything to get in your way or to get you further away from that thing.

SH: These sessions, do they come in bursts? Or do you write one story at a time?

EK: It really changed when my life changed. Because when I started writing, I was single, now I’m married and I have a child. I always
write kind of not regularly. I usually can write one day a week or something or one day a month. Sometimes not write for long periods.

In the old days when I would write, I could write for 28 hours straight. I could write eight stories in a row. Five of them would be crap, but I remember the sensation of realizing that you haven’t eaten for more than a day or you didn’t sleep for more than a day. Sometimes when you see those bad sci-fi movies, where people moved from one place to another. It’s very much like that. Actually, there were times when I would write a lot and I would get physically ill. Because I’d write naked and the apartment wouldn’t be heated. It’s completely a situation of disconnecting from my physical self, and it’s a problem with me. Now I’m working on it a lot not to be in this condition. All the back problems I have, they really have to do with that. I can write like this [hunches shoulders uncomfortably] for 15 hours, and somebody could go into the room and say, “What happened to your neck?” And I’d say, “Ah, okay. Sorry.” It may sound romantic when I say it, but it’s actually, for me, a problem.

And having a child and getting married puts everything more into perspective. I need to have some kind of perspective outside of that, because in the past, if I started writing on Monday and I finished Wednesday morning, nobody would notice. Now, I have to pick my child up from kindergarten. I have to do all this stuff. So, I put on an alarm clock. It’s not as total as it used to be. And I don’t feel bad about it. I feel good about having more of a life. Most of the time when I used to write, I wouldn’t have anything besides writing.

SH: Who is your ideal reader?

EK: I usually look at myself as my reader. I always feel that my prime objective in writing a story is so that I’ll be able to read it. When
I’m writing a story, my wish to get there is not to get there so I can show it to people, but so that I can know it myself. I would say the
restlessness I have when I write is because, more than writing a story, I’m actually reading it. I have to write so that I have something to read. The action that I’m more conscious of is my reading than my writing. When I stop writing and I’m stuck, I’m most stuck in my reading. That’s what complicates it. It’s funny because in my life, I’m worried for everyone around me and I’m very considerate, but writing is a self-centered experience.

SH: Do you think that your approach, and why you can’t write with anyone around you, is somehow related to this idea of wanting a part of your life that’s not focused on other people?

EK: Yeah, for me it’s almost a curse. Before I went on this trip, my wife said to me, “You must promise me that you won’t be nice to all
the people that you meet, because there is something about me—my parents and all they’ve been through—my mother saw both her parents killed and lost her brother [in the Holocaust]—I grew up surrounded by people that gave me a lot of love, but I’m always thinking about other people. My wife, she can’t stand it.

We were in Italy, and we were in this place called Piazza Navona—it’s a really nice piazza, and they have this fountain. People sit kind of around the fountain, so my wife was sitting on the fountain, and I said to her, “There is this five-year-old girl and you’re blocking the fountain. She wants to look at the fountain.” And she said, “I don’t care. It’s a public place. Everybody sits here. She can move a little bit. When I sit, I sit. When you want to sit, you look around. You don’t want to block anybody’s sight. You keep on standing. That’s why you have lower back problems.” And that’s the thing about it. There is something very liberating about writing. Because the moment it’s complete you don’t need to think about it. Because for me, even if I consciously decide not to be considerate, I worry always. It’s something that is always in my awareness. The people I hate the most: you know those people, when you get on the escalator, and they get off the escalator and then they start looking in their pockets, and all the people coming up are going to bump into them. And I try to understand why I hate them so much, and I realize that I hate them because I’m jealous of them. I’m jealous of the fact that they can be so inconsiderate. And I have to find in writing a kind of space where I can be like them.

SH: Who are some of the writers you look to as influences? You’ve mentioned Kafka and Yehuda Amichai. If you could talk about those two maybe, or any others, and what it is about their work that you gravitate to?

EK: I started writing during my compulsory military service in Israel, and at the time, during my basic training, I remember reading both Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut. I read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in the army. And that was a good time to read it. Both the Kafkaesque situation of the army and Vonnegut’s experience of war. And there was something that was a big surprise about reading them, because they didn’t write the way I thought people were supposed to write. In Israel a lot of the writing is slightly moralistic. Not the best writing, but most of the writing you find tries to teach you things about life, and I felt with both Kafka and Vonnegut, there was something very moral in the writing, but they were not moralizing. The moral was not in them saying, “We have the answer.” I felt that this was the trigger to understand that I could write. Because I don’t know how things should be. But I know that sometimes they shouldn’t be the way that they are.

You know, in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut talks about the fact that he was in a hospital with a general. He broke his foot or something. And he was telling him that he was in Dresden during the fire-bombing, and how he would take the bodies of the dead, and he once took out the body of a young woman that was hiding in a water tank, and the heated water had boiled her alive. And the general says to him, “So what do you think we were supposed to do? If we wouldn’t have bombed it, the Germans would have never given up.” And he said, “I’m not saying what we were supposed to do. I’m just saying that I was taking her out of the tank,
and she was completely burned.” And the fact that you could write a story about taking someone out of a tank being completely burned, even if you don’t know any better solution, but just kind of stating that. That was something I really, really felt strongly about reading Vonnegut. And there was something about Kafka: I really felt that reading him had this disorienting effect. It kind of wakes you up to your own life. You ask yourself, “Where am I?” I think the combination of those two really got me started. There are many others, too, that affected me a lot: Isaac Babel, John Cheever, many of the Russian writers like Chekhov, Gogol, Nabokov. But I think that those two, Vonnegut and Kafka, they were the ones that changed the way I perceived writing. The feeling I had when I was reading Kafka’s short stories was that I didn’t know that you were allowed to write like that. I thought that if you write like that they don’t publish you or they put you in jail or beat you up. But if he could do that, maybe I could write too.

SH: It seems like childhood is a very important part of your fictional landscape—whether it’s your own particular childhood, or the idea of it. In what ways do you find yourself going back to it?

EK: First of all, I had an amazing childhood. But not only that, while having it, being a small child, my earliest memories were of realizing that it would be gone, and it petrified me. When I was in kindergarten, there was this one time when I stood on the table
and I started explaining to the kids why we shouldn’t go to school. “When we go to school we lose our freedom. We have to do homework. We have to sit at the tables. We won’t be able to do what we want to do.” Then I just burst into tears. They called my parents to take me home. And basically since finishing kindergarten, I skipped school for the entire school year. I wouldn’t go to school most of the time. I almost got kicked out of school. I hated it. It’s amazing, because I always had a feeling like I both enjoyed my childhood, but while experiencing it, I knew that I was going to lose it, and that there’s nothing I could do about it.

I now have a son and it gives me a chance to revisit this. I’m completely jealous of him. I’m jealous not because it’s always happy
and great to be a child. I’m jealous of him even from seeing how sad he can get about things that I don’t give a fuck about. It’s amazing, you know. Even if you look at the physical side, babies can scream for hours and hours and they never lose their voice. If you scream, you lose your voice. And the reason they don’t lose their voice is because, when they scream, they use their voice the right way. With time, you forget how to use your voice the right way.

My son, you know, he can do somersaults, flip-flacks, and stuff. He’s three years old, he’s crazy. When he falls, when he gets hit, he
heals in one second. He’s flexible, all the things about him. He accepts life; he’s proud of life. And you have this feeling that there’s something about you that becomes more and more tight-ass and more and more resistant to doing things that way. It’s not that I’m
saying that childhood is good, and being grown up is bad. There are many fucked up things about childhood. But there is this, I would say, more immediate connection to life. It doesn’t go through mediations, it doesn’t go through complications. It’s just you and life, and it hits you real strong, you know. It’s almost a kind of masochistic yearning, knowing that I can’t get hit the way it hits him today. I can’t be caught off guard, which is the way life gets you when you’re a kid.

Also, there’s this obvious aspect that childhood really keeps you outside of society, so it makes it possible for you to be much more critical of society. It’s like in a car where you have those blind spots, you never see anything there. But when you’re a kid you would just ask to get in the car so you could sit in the back and see those places where a lot of grown-ups can’t see.

SH: Yeah, there’s an intensity of emotion that comes with childhood. For example, how much an ice cream cone matters when it falls to the ground. It’s a kind of insanity. Because they have no scale…

EK: Exactly. It’s funny, you know, because sometimes people hear my son, and he’s very aggressive, but there’s a sincerity about him. The kindergarten teacher says that it is very extreme, even for children—his sincerity. He’ll tell you exactly what he thinks. The kindergarten teacher can say to him, “What would be most fun to do now?” And he would say, “Well, most fun would be to take a rock and throw it at that girl. But I think it would get me into trouble, so I’ll just paint
something.” [Laughter] He’s really funny and extreme.

Now, he’s very aggressive. You know what he said to me? He said to me, “You know what I think. If I could be quick enough, I can
catch a lightning. And once I have enough lightning, I can throw it at people I don’t like.” And you know when there’s a storm, he’s
outside going like [making a snatching gesture]. He has this actual frustration of not being able to catch lightning.

SH: Your idea of sincerity seems more profound and layered than what we think of when we hear that word. It’s not earnestness or
fake honesty.

EK: It’s also not sharing it with people, it’s being aware of it yourself. It’s not telling people what you want. It’s knowing what you want. Now there is this fall in the stock exchange, you know. And I have my pension, and it lost 30%. And I was calling and yelling at this guy from the bank, and I said, “You told me it was safe, and it’s not safe!”

SH: Is it a state kind of thing, or is it tied up with a company?

EK: It’s tied up with a company, but the state makes you get one. They made me get one, and now it’s a crappy one. I said to him, “I
just wanted the safest one, then I lose 30%. How safe can it be if I lose 30%?” And then, at some point, I said to the guy, “I’m sorry I
shouted at you. It’s just that I’m afraid to die. I’m really afraid to die. I’m afraid of dying and leaving my family. I’m afraid of getting
old. And that’s why I’m shouting at you.” It took me 20 minutes to understand that. But the moment I did, I really understood it.

SH: I’m not quite understanding how losing 30% of your pension caused that realization.

EK: All these things—pensions and insurance—they all have to do with some sort of fear you have. So, basically the moment they took some money away, my fear becomes bigger. And my fear becomes bigger because the money was never an answer in the first place. All the time, we act on one thing, when we’re actually experiencing another.

SH: I see… You also teach. What do you teach?

EK: I taught filmmaking most of my life, but the last couple of years I’ve taught creative writing, and also Israeli Literature.

SH: I didn’t know that. How many films have you made besides Jellyfish?

EK: I did them in all different kinds of hats. I did a couple of feature films as a writer. I did Jellyfish as a director. I did another TV drama as a director. I wrote this story “Happy Campers” which was made into Wristcutters: A Love Story. I was always around it. I wrote for TV.

But there is something I find easier about teaching writing for films, because it’s more formulated. You know, you have a three act
structure. And the screenplay is a public space. Everyone talks to you about the screenplay. It’s like a blueprint of something. So it’s much easier for someone to say move this wall, then to say to somebody change your story.

I always say to my creative writing students that a workshop is like an A. A. meeting. There are a lot of people and they say, “My
name is Larry, and I write fiction.” And we say, “We love you, Larry.” And it’s mostly about that. It’s about being in an area where you can have these acoustics, where you can read your stories, and see how they resonate, and have people attack them and learn by that how much you actually like them and don’t want to change them. So it’s more like a laboratory. I don’t think you learn proficiencies.

I actually hate this American attitude of what they call “The Well-Written Story.” I once taught at Wesleyan and I had this wonderful class, and they kept counting verbs and adverbs and saying that there are too many commas in this story. They were looking at the subject like an exact science. I would say to them that I hate the idea of a well-written story. I am all for this idea of a badly written
good story. Because what often happens when you focus on how you write, sometimes you forget what you write.

I think it’s like, say, an “American Idol” singer. Listen to an “American Idol” guy when he sings a Bob Dylan song. He will sing much better than Dylan. He has a better voice. He’s very much aware of it. But when he sings, he doesn’t sing it for the song. He sings about his singing. So they tell you in those creative writing classes to develop your technique. But actually writing is not about technique, it’s about communicating. So I don’t mind if somebody will stutter or repeat a sentence five times, if it’s in it, you know. But the moment
someone is extremely articulate…Used car salesmen are extremely articulate, but what do they have to say to me? I don’t go to creative classes to teach my students. I try to help them be themselves and protect them from other creative writing teachers. There are many
situations where I say, “Hey! Stop telling my students to write in a high register. I don’t like it.” I just want them to be whatever they are. I always say to my students, let’s say, when I taught in film school. I would say, “Don’t try to write like Tarantino, because Tarantino will always be better than you at writing Tarantino. Just try to write yourself.” And writing yourself is kind of making your own mistakes, and going in directions you’re not completely certain about. It’s not about writing those perfect sentences.

It’s not about not repeating the word. If you feel it, you could repeat it. Don’t count your adjectives. And after that, you know, use your compass to say, “Is that true? Is that not true? Is that necessary?” If it’s not necessary, throw it away. Don’t try to construct a beautiful story. Because stories have a function, even if it transcends that meaning, and that function is not to be beautiful, it’s to project something. So that’s the danger of those creative writing programs sometimes. They teach you how to write beautiful stories. They teach you how to write better than other people, when you shouldn’t write better than other people. You should write yourself.

SH: In terms of the implications that has for personal style, do you see, when you look back at a story like “Pipes,” an evolution in your own work? What’s changed in your own style, if anything?

EK: I would say the only thing that’s changed is me. I would say that when I started writing, I was much angrier. Now I’m less angry. I think that there was something more extreme in my character. I think my stories are still extreme but in a different kind of sense. So I really think when I started writing, let’s say, I was horny, and I could hardly find girls, you know. So there are stories about horny people. Now I have stories about people in relationships that are bored to death. So it always has to do with your position in life. I always extreme-ize it. I always write about my fears, not my reality. But anything will change, even, you know, I could tell you what
changed stylistically, but even if my style changed, it has to do with some inherent change in me.

Short story writer, filmmaker, children’s book author, and graphic novelist Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been translated into over twenty languages and collected in the U.S. in The Nimrod Flipout and The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. His debut as a film director (Jellyfish) won the 2007 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Keret’s latest collection, The Girl on the Fridge, was published in April 2008.