Writers’ Fridges: Etgar Keret

In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I moved out of my parents’ place, it took me no more than a week to feel at home at my new, tiny, rented apartment. The bed was comfortable, the shower water warm and friendly, and the ripped beanbag on the little balcony was just perfect for napping. The only thing that felt a little distant and cold was the fridge. My mom, who was the best cook ever, had been very protective of her kitchen and barely let my siblings or me enter it. This had made me develop a polite relationship with my parents’ fridge, formed on a strict need-a-beer basis. But my rented apartment’s old fridge wasn’t as nice as my parents’ and it took me only a few attempts to realize that it didn’t have any beers inside.

At some stage, hunger had forced me to buy some frozen vegetarian burgers which I stuffed in its deep freeze section. I didn’t have a gas stove or a microwave at the time so, when I’d get hungry enough, I’d suck on the frozen veggie schnitzels until they got soft enough to bite into.

Years passed, many things changed, I moved, but, sadly, my fridge and I didn’t grow any closer. To this day I pass before the fridge doors like a priest in The Temple passing in front of The Holy Ark, knowing its hidden secrets will never be mine. The deep freeze section, however, is a different story for this aspiring microwave oven mega-chef who looks back on his schnitzel-sucking days with both contempt and remorse.

Etgar Keret’s most recent book is Fly Already. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and on “This American Life,” where he is a regular contributor. His story “A Bet” appears in our Summer 2005 issue.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2Zte1hf

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog