Pizzeria Kamikaze is a quiet, comfortable place where you can easily find a job afterlife. One of hundreds, thousands bars, clubs or stuffs like those, in a city whit no name, inside a chilled paradise that is just a point of view, the suicide’s one. A matryoshka – shaped maze, not so far away from our real life. Etgar Keret is the Israeli writer who tries to imagine how could hereafter be, if you have refused this world, voluntarily serving your own existence. First of all, in Keret’s picture you should be very young to “jump” there, ‘cause it’s hard to find a reason for self-killing, when somebody do have something to lose. It is strongly recommend to earn a few money in some legal way, money to spend in a colorless place called Bar-A, avoiding Kurt Cobain and its dull complain. After this, you have to be keen, tolerant and peaceful, a paragon of virtue able to stand the air headed everyday without asking for more; don’t’ forget you can’t almost have sex, if you are a real kamikaze, so it’s necessary to find another way to relax. Then you should preferably save yourself from racism, thus it will be easier to stand the neighborly of the several foreigners you will find out on your way. All together it’s better, or something like this. At least it’s advisable to avoid every kind of beloved seeking, getting by the comedown of a regrettable discovery. What a place, or, maybe, what a hell!

Keret turns over the purpose of being mixed from the cradle to the grave, but fatally alone in death: in a parallel, surreal universe, a double of one we live in, we have to share a joint future even in the netherworld. Where we’ll go, what we’ll do won’t depend on why we’ve killed ourselves, or how, so there is no reason to separate doped from Jesus, shoot suicides from pills abusers; in this upper fair play, there are just two rules for surviving: never try to kill ourselves again and circumvent wonders, which is also the easiest way to do them quickly. Everyone can be a sort of God, afterlife. The characters are strongly similar to the contemporary Israeli youth, but as a matter of fact they could also be Americans, Russians, Europeans, Orientals: all bored, frustrated and pain addicted, used to the idea of being redundant. They don’t give a fuck of leaving, getting separate from their families, they just go in for carnal love, drinking alcohol and have fun; high ideals are out of vogue, optional. Jesus himself reminds to a trouser advertizing, the one with “follow me” on the bottom; listening to techno music while making its wonders, shuffling almost naked all along his space-age manor, he is a superstar, an icon of style, savoir-faire and fashion, according to the contemporary overview of an ancient myth. Even Mordy, the romantic and sensitive protagonist of this rambling short story, gets captivate by meeting him, although they are rivals in love; in the braking system of the teenage bullying, Christ is a hard guy, Mordy a looser who, in the end, actually looses both Desiree, his ex girlfriend, and Lihy, the hitchhiker he took aboard during his previous trip.

Well written, sober but forceful, sometimes rude but never trite, this tale is the longest one in a collection of visions Keret wrote in Tel Aviv, outlining an unforeseen tragicomic portrait of a round-robin mood, widespread across the twenty-something generation; its black humor, due to the Israeli/Palestinian school, seals every way out to the disgusting present we sure as hell have to do with, in one way or another.

About me, this book it’s worth the cost, and even more.

by Silvana Soffia

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