The Seven Good Years: A Memoir
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Etgar Keret's first nonfiction book published in America covers seven years, framed by two events: the birth of his son Lev and the death of his father. Lev arrives at a hospital while victims of a suicide bombing are being brought in. Conversations among parents of toddlers turn to whether their children will serve in the army at eighteen. Private life and national life are difficult to separate.
Keret writes in short tragicomic pieces rather than one continuous narrative. Some follow his son, including Lev's insistence that he is a cat and therefore released from human rules and responsibilities. Others turn to the author's own family: a sister who became ultra-Orthodox and has eleven children, a brother who is a pacifist and supports legalizing marijuana, and parents who survived the Holocaust.
Further pieces move outward, from an old school friend whose main fear is that his matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower will be destroyed by a Scud missile, to the thinking behind the game Angry Birds. After his father's death, the siblings gather for the shivah, the Jewish mourning period, each arriving from a very different life. Worry, illness, and war run through the whole record.
