The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God (review)

Doesn’t Want stood next to Can’t. Or maybe it was the other way around; it’s not really essential. Let’s say that both of them stood next to each other so no one’s insulted. His commanders took pains to make sure the arrangement was in fact fixed, with Can’t standing next to Doesn’t Want. . . . He, for his part, didn’t try to argue at all. Arguments with commanders always ended badly. Besides, in this specific case he didn’t understand what there was to dispute. Desire and ability are such different things—what’s there to be confused about? Look, there’s an ocean of things he wants [to do or have] but can’t, and another hundred things he can’t [do or have] but wants . . . with enough effort he might find something that he can both do and want. Like crawling through a hole in the fence and hitching a ride home... But these Can’ts of his keep standing next to the Don’t Wants. . . . Tens of Can’ts next to hundreds of Don’t Wants. Standing like soldiers. Even if it’s hard. Even forever. With just five minutes rest per hour, when permitted.¹

St. Martin’s Press has just published an English anthology of super-short stories by dynamo Israeli author, Etgar Keret: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. The two paragraph story above, “Doesn’t Want,” is not in the collection, but many of its elements are. The story appeared in Hebrew in the Independence Day, “military literature” issue of Israel’s Army magazine, Bamah.ane, in April 1995. This was also the year in which Missing Kissinger was published, Keret’s second collection of stories in Hebrew that catapulted him to “hippest young author” status (as the book jacket claims) among Israeli readers. “Doesn’t Want,” epitomizes the sub-atomic inner lives of Keret’s protagonists and the normative social environments in which they react. Conduits (such as holes in fences) repeatedly fascinate and lead to nether worlds in which dialectical human drives struggle against one another in old/new regimented forevers. St. Martin’s’ English collection captivates with its full range of Keret’s nineties’ Israeli personae, both human and supernatural: schoolboys, older brothers, fathers, soldiers, adolescent to middle age drifters, schoolgirls, girlfriends, mothers, teachers, Holocaust survivors, national icons, dwarfs, daemons, and more. Just listing this many brings to mind my glimpse of Etgar Keret during National Book Week in Tel Aviv in June 1995. A friend pointed him out literally jumping from one fan to another just as he flashes between ever changing identities and interventions of chance in his micro-stories.

Like Keret’s anthologies in Hebrew, however, this English collection also reveals patterns of characterization. Since they read so rapidly, in a volume such as this Keret’s stories give the added illusion of an integrated motion picture, created as in the first days of film, when one zips through a stack of single frame cartoons or vignettes. The author’s predominant snap shots are of schoolboys and twenty to thirty-something lingering adolescents. Returning to “Doesn’t Want,” the first person narrators in both age groups want to safeguard idiosyncratic, often literal takes on their surroundings (local, national, and/or global). Keret’s male protagonists can’t keep their mental pictures from insult, however, just by following through on their “warped” notions of protective logic (to use the language of the book jacket). In each stance some footing is lost, whether in keeping a porcelain mascot safe or in keeping pure the privilege, amid Middle Eastern Jewish classmates, of having a grandfather who died in the Holocaust. In some stories a son’s illegal rescue efforts (vandalizing a national museum to reclaim his mother’s uterus on display) are thwarted by chance. In other situations taking the outwardly ethical route brings not only failure, but also the hint that a little...