Etgar Keret is a renowned Israeli writer who favours the short-story form and Autocorrect is his latest collection. For those yet to encounter him, Keret’s work is surreal and quirky; he upends expectations so you never quite know how his tales will end. The opening salvo, ‘A World without Selfie Sticks’, is a prime example of his craft. It’s a tale about alternate universes in which a man discovers a woman who looks identical to – but isn’t actually – his wife. She’s ‘Not-Debbie’, existing in a parallel dimension.
Autocorrect‘s tone on the whole is wry and droll, with a modern sense of ennui and desperation as his characters try and flail to make connections with one another. Relationships – between men and women, parent and offspring – are explored in these contemporary vignettes that have sci-fi overtones. The delivery is often deadpan and, every now and then, in service to the necessary economies of the short story, large swathes of history are summarised in a throwaway sentence: ‘People, by the way, became extinct a short time later’ intones the narrator in one tale. Another one begins with the bald statement, ‘The world is about to end and I’m eating olives.’ As you do.
With 33 offerings, some will resonate more brightly for the individual reader than others. The ones that only last a page or two seem underdeveloped – kernels of ideas dashed off without any contextual heft.
In several stories, Keret’s twinning of AI and real life is both disturbing and intriguing. It seems to be a thematic obsession for him in this book. One of the better ones involves a neuroscientist’s decision to cure loneliness via a project ‘designed to create a twin soul for every person in the world, a computerised entity that could fit the individual it was intended for like a glove’, so in other words – a robotic companion. It’s been written about many a time before; see for instance the solar-powered artificial friends in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun – but what if these models outlive their human counterparts, Keret ponders?
The title story, ‘Autocorrect’ is a Sliding Doors-style affair where the same beginning is splintered off into different endings – only one of which averts tragedy. Death in fact, permeates this book, in ways both accidental and natural. ‘Genesis, Chapter O’ takes a speeding look at the stages of a life, with all its boredoms, frustrations, irritations, fear and joy, and then concludes with the matter-of-fact comment that, post-life, everything is ‘One big no‘.
In ‘The future is not what it used to be’ Keret examines time travel in his idiosyncratic manner. A machine has been invented that can transcend time but, despite its tourism potential, the project has one major problem: it doesn’t quite know how to bring people back, so visitors are at risk of ‘permanent relocation’. There is, however, another glitch that’s duly turned into an advantageous sell point: as travellers apparently lose weight when sent to the past, the idea is relaunched as a weight-loss venture. After all, isn’t it ‘much easier to change the world than to cut out sugar and carbs?’
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The beauty of Keret’s stories rests with his imaginative playfulness. If you ever wanted to read about the last remaining humans acting as travel guides for the colonising alien, or a filmmaker taking 73 years to make a movie that corresponds pulse by pulse with a human lifespan, or a newly dead having to wait in an endless line with others – including an angel no less – before they can finally get into the next world and meet the ‘Creator’, then Autocorrect will deliver.
Autocorrect, Etgar Keret, (transcribed by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston)
Publisher: Scribe Publication
ISBN: 9781761380709
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208pp
Release date: 1 July 2025
RRP: $29.99
