The Seven Good Years: A Memoir - Hardcover

Keret, Etgar

4.16

8,334 ratings by Goodreads

9781594633263: The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594633266 ISBN 13: 9781594633263

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2015

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A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller. With illustrations by Jason Polan.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.

What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir—Etgar’s first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.

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Review:

An Amazon Best Book of June 2015: Etgar Keret is not your usual memoirist. For his first foray into the genre—he is the author of several lauded short story collections—Keret chose the titular Seven Good Years between the birth of his son and the death of his father as temporal boundaries for a series of four- to five-page vignettes and ruminations, ranging from humorous to anxious (but humorous) to heavy (and humorous). And for the most part, those events don’t even define the content of this collection. Keret—a native of Israel—contemplates moments of his life against a backdrop of constant conflict, casting an absurd light on both the monumental and mundane: a time-wasting game of chicken with a telemarketer becomes an irritating memento mori; the terrorist subtext of Angry Birds comes disturbingly (if somewhat speciously) clear; a whimsical mustache conjures a story of a near-fatal encounter in Lebanon. His compact style benefits the brevity of the pieces, perfectly matching his skewed and occasionally detached tone; Keret is a sort of bemused and sometimes baffled observer of the world and the people who inhabit it, and simply a wonderful writer. --Jon Foro

About the Author:

Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the author, most recently, of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections like The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages and 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.

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