Subversive Imagination

On Etgar Keret

He’s most effective when he strips away the constraints of realism and gives rein to his subversive imagination. In “Unzipping,” a woman named Ella finds a small zipper under her lover’s tongue as he lies sleeping. When she pulls it, her lover opens up “like an oyster,” revealing a second man. Ella soon realizes she has a zipper under her tongue as well, and the story ends with her fingering it uncertainly, trying “to imagine what she’d be like inside.” It’s an eerie meditation on the instability of identity, and spans all of five paragraphs.

In gems like this, Keret evinces what the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim called “the uses of enchantment,” an ability to compel readers to experience their hidden terrors by means of symbolic narrative. Bettelheim used the term to describe fairy tales. It’s a testament to Keret’s unorthodox gifts that his dark evocations read with the same disarming allure.

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