Much has been written in the press lately about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can't turn on the news without hearing the opinions of experts or seeing the latest images of death from one of the world's most volatile regions. It seems as though everyone has an opinion. So it's always nice to take a break from all that conjecture and get an insight into what life's really like for those who are in the midst of it all.

Etgar Keret might be virtually unheard of over here, but back in his native Israel, he's a household name. His work for theatre and film has been touted as some of the best of his generation. His book, Missing Kissinger (the short story of which is in this collection) was voted one of the 50 most important Israeli books of all time by the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Nearly everything he has worked on has been showered with awards.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God is the first English translation of some of Keret's most popular works. It is a somewhat idiosyncratic collection featuring 21 extremely short stories (less than 1,000 words each) and one extremely long one (well over 10,000 words) that vary between the comedic and the allegorically absurd. Reading it now couldn't be much timelier.

Keret's prose is very sparse. He writes with a rabid pacing that leaves no room in his short sound-bites of prose for anything but the most rudimentary outlines of description. This can get annoying in places, particularly when it starts hampering our understanding of his heroes. Take, for example, this opening from one of the shortest stories in the collection, "Rabin's Dead":

Rabin's dead. It happened last night. He got run over by a scooter with a sidecar. Rabin died on the spot. The guy on the scooter got hurt real bad and passed out and they took him away in an ambulance. They didn't even touch Rabin. He was so dead, there was nothing they could do. (p. 49)

And so on for another 500 words. Two pages of prose that tells us literally nothing of who the main character is or why we should care about Rabin (who it turns out is his pet cat). I should add that not all of the stories are written in quite so staccato a style as the passage above, but it's a good example of what Keret does—to use the colloquial to cut into the heart of a story. No setting the scene, no messing around with time and place. Just, "Rabin's dead." It's one of those narrative tricks that people either love or hate. Personally, I found it quite endearing, but it took a while to grow on me. The impersonal account means that the narrative could be happening anywhere to anyone but with a spin on it that is uniquely Israeli. You find yourself drawn in instinctively by the similarities only to be confronted by the differences. You feel as though you understand the situation because the main character thinks the same way that you do. It also means the translators probably had an easy time of things, Keret's vocabulary never stretching far beyond the most thesaurus-friendly words. This might sound like a moot point until you realise that the ease of reading means that Keret's authorial voice remains strong throughout.

There are some stories that are incredibly well-worked, the plotting intelligent and the ideas sharp. Equally, there are others that are, frankly, diabolical, but it doesn't matter, because no matter how bad a story might be, you are never more than two pages away from a good one. For me, it felt a bit like I was reading the book equivalent of a sketch show. Its fast, relentless pace gives you almost no time to do anything but keep up.

I do get the impression though that some of these stories were written purely to pander to those readers who consider Keret a "funny writer." The problem is, Keret is a funny writer but not when he's trying to be. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I found it was pathos rather than slapstick humour that underlay this book's best moments. In "The Mysterious Disappearance of Alon Shemesh," for example, we have a story in which the children at an Israeli school are disappearing one by one for no reason. Every time someone tries to find out what's happened to them, they themselves vanish until the only person left in the whole town is the narrator himself, who seems surprisingly blasé about the whole thing. These stories, as contrived as they are, are funny. They're made even funnier by the clarity of their subtext.

When he's good like this, Keret is excellent. He writes from the heart, filling his passages with touching moments. As an ex-military man, it's unsurprising that themes of war and death crop up repeatedly throughout his delicate pastiches, but the issues are always distilled, human, the problems dealt with in a mature manner. The issues Keret talks about are larger than the abilities of his characters to deal with them—a reflection perhaps on his own admission of inadequacy. Take one of my favourite stories for example, "Cocked and Locked." A harrowing portrayal of an Israeli soldier trying to keep the peace in a Palestinian village. The Palestinians are aggressive towards the soldier and continue to be so until he snaps and kills one of them, thus re-enforcing the image that the Israelis are vicious murderers in the eyes of the Palestinian locals. Keret is fascinated by such themes as life, death and the afterlife; of good, evil, and how such tenets of the Jewish faith fit alongside the current tensions in the area.

The best story by far is the novelette, "Kneller's Happy Campers." A bleak tale, it tells the story of a special afterlife inhabited by the souls of people who committed suicide. Along with the regular people who decided to top themselves there are several suicide bombers who, having been promised an afterlife full of naked virgins, must now console themselves with an existence not unlike the world we live in now. We follow a member of the recently deceased who, after finding out his ex-girlfriend also killed herself, decides to try tracking her down. It's the blackest of black comedy—after all, he's trying to patch things up with a girlfriend he left in the first place by taking his own life—but remarkably touching.

I was pleasantly surprised by this collection. Keret understands his country in a way that is far more personal and satisfying than any of the reports found on TV. These stories probably aren't as profound as they would be to their intended audience, and they won't make you laugh nearly as much as the book jacket claims. But they will make you smile and perhaps make you stop for a moment and consider what life's really like for those normal people who are just trying to get on with their lives behind the smokescreen of the media.

R.J. Burgess is from Crawley, West Sussex and has wanted to be a writer for most of his life. A recent graduate of a Creative Writing degree from Middlesex University, he is still relatively new to SF but is quickly finding his feet.