Review: The Girl on the Fridge

The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What incredibly short stories! Oftentimes a few paragraphs long, or a few pages at most, these stories were extremely quick, which was a nice way to experience reading: I could sit down, zip through a few, and set the book aside with zero stress.

However, perhaps due to their brevity or maybe something else, I was often left feeling frustrated. Where was the story? These seemed to be more snapshots, introductions to interesting situations or ideas, but rarely anything that felt like a full and complete story. This is a problem I find myself facing with many short story collections, where the "stories" feel more like character sketches or introductions to full stories that then fail to materialize. So in many ways, this collection was just one more that left me unfulfilled.

Yet I cannot say I did not enjoy it at all. The ideas and characters and situations Keret presents are fresh and unique. The stories cohere in a vague way that I might only identify by rereading the book in its entirety, but they always felt like they belonged in this collection, no matter how banal or bizarre. So the next time I have novel fatigue, I just might pick up another collection by Keret. Because sometimes, freshness and brevity is worth a little frustration.

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