Kevin's Reviews > פתאום דפיקה בדלת

Judging by all the 4&5 star reviews, I was clearly missing something here, as for me this began as a huge disappointment.
Unlike the glowing reviews on the back cover, I didn't see much maturity on display here, more the opposite in fact. Neither was the authors renowned humour apparent, although many stories began like the start of a good joke - "A man and his son walk into an acupuncturists' treatment room", they invariably ended like bad ones, with no punch line. "There's nothing stranger than hearing a Chinese man speak Hebrew". ( both extracts are from the story 'Snot').
Other reviews use words like 'moving' and 'understated', again I had to disagree, to me they were immature, felt deliberately rushed, and lacked feeling. I kept moving to the next story, looking for a profoundly affecting tale, hoping to be proved wrong, but kept getting the 'Emperors New Clothes' feeling that there was nothing here to see.
Then I read "What do we have in our pockets", a charming tale, just a couple of pages long, and I was moved by the melancholy beauty of it. It reminded me of David Gaffney's 'Sawn off Tales', and is already possibly one of my favourite short stories of all time. And that was it. One fleeting beacon of brilliance in a vast sea of mediocrity.
Another GR reviewer and massive Keret fan even agreed that this is best avoided as an introduction to his work, and perhaps that's the case. However, I couldn't remember any of the other stories in this book a minute after I'd finished them, and it's only that one great story that stops me from giving this 1 star.