Kneller's Happy Campers

Jul 16, 2025 10:07 PM

Author:Etgar Keret

Kneller's Happy Campers is a strange, dark but funny tale set in a world very much like our own but it's an afterlife populated by people who have killed themselves - many of them are young, and most of them bear the marks of their death... bullet wounds, broken necks...(those who have over-dosed are known as 'Juliets').

When Mordy, our hero, discovers that his girlfriend from his life before has also 'offed' herself, he sets out to find her, and so follows a strange adventure...

Full of the weird and wonderful characters, and the slightly surreal twist of events that we've come to expect from Etgar Keret, this novella is full of humour and comic flashes, but it is also wistful, longing for a better world and perfect love.

Reviews

Etgar Keret's writing hits like a bullet. Kneller's Happy Campers is fast and bizarre and full of a fearless street-punk surrealism, as though Charles Bukowski is channelling the imagination of Lewis Carroll. The darkest fun I've read in ages

—— Matt Haig

Keret mixes the laconic style of Raymond Carver and the insane wit of Quentin Tarantino into his own particular, melancholy combination of themes... It's not just a story about people who have taken their lives, but rather a metaphor on how the post-ideological generation is trying to live and survive in this world

—— Spiegel

There is a subtle mix of innocence and awareness, of caustic irony and tender humour that emerges from this text, as well as from its brilliant author

—— Le Monde

I think he is a brilliant writer, entirely different from any other I know. He is the voice of the next generation

—— Salman Rushdie

Mishima's imagery is as artful as a Japanese flower arrangement

—— New York Times

The work of Tanizaki offers to us in the West one of the most valuable keys to understanding the Japanese crisis of identity

—— Independent

An extraordinary book which can truly be said to break new ground

—— New Yorker

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