The Seven Good Years
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.|
‘I just got here an hour ago, all excited, with my wife about to give birth. And now I’m sitting in the hallway feeling glum. Everyone has gone to treat the people injured in the terrorist attack. My wife’s contractions have slowed down, too. Probably even the baby feels this whole getting-born thing isn’t that urgent anymore.’
Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years is a sad and hilarious tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms. He is accompanied by his beloved wife, Shira; his eclectic family; and the strange bedfellows, taxi drivers, and old friends he meets as he flies around the world to participate in writers’ festivals, and sometimes ill-fated book signings.
As he travels from his home in Tel Aviv, to the US, Bali, Poland, Greece, and back again, Keret deals in his own way with everyday life — from convincing a tele-marketer he’s dead, and investing in a hotdog stand, to growing a moustache as a birthday present for his son, playing ‘pastrami sandwich’ with his family during an air raid, and ending up stepping into his father’s shoes.
Displaying a comic genius akin to David Sedaris, Keret once again reminds us of the co-existence of the absurd and the wonderful. Keret’s world is one where the personal and the national are hard to distinguish, and where, if you didn’t laugh, you’d have to cry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slim, episodic set of recollections, acclaimed Israeli fiction writer Keret (The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God) covers the span between the birth of his son and the death of his father. In spare, wry prose, he recounts his child's birth, the same day as a terrorist attack, and sums up the violent underpinnings of current Israeli life when he tells a disappointed journalist that "the attacks are always the same. What can you say about an explosion and senseless death?" This apolitical, irreligious, and wry fatalism recalls a great deal of Jewish humor, a meditation on the absurd and vital. The initial courtship of Keret's parents, both Holocaust survivors, is lovingly described with a thirst for life that reflects the vitality of Israel's earliest decades. Keret thinks and feels deeply, but he makes heavy points with a light touch, describing a childhood friend as having "the smiling but tough expression of an aging child who had already learned a thing or two about this stupid world." While the short chapters move in linear fashion, each stands firmly on its own.. Without overplaying any single aspect of a complicated life in complicated times in a complicated place, Keret's lovely memoir retains its essential human warmth, demonstrating that with memoirs, less can often be more.
Customer Reviews
Spare does not come close
4.5 stars
Author
Israeli writer of short stories, graphic novels, and scripts for film and television. Published in more than thirty languages.
Premise
Memoir of the years between the birth of his son and the death of his father. The author's first non-fiction work.
Narrative
Series of absurdist vignettes, which contain plenty of humour and some poignant insights.
Characters
The author and his family are the principals. Numerous walk-on roles.
Prose
Spare does not come close. I know of no other living writer capable of producing such well rounded stories in fewer words. He gets a little more reflective and less amusing in the latter stages, but the picture he paints of every day Israelis getting on with life in a perpetual war zone is superb.
Bottom line
I re-read this while awaiting release of Mr K's latest (Fly Already), and found it better second time around.