Tel Aviv (AFP)

Beneath his laid-back demeanor and joking smile, Israeli author Etgar Keret describes himself as "deeply distressed", a trend that the coronavirus crisis has not "fixed" to the point of finding himself in uncertainty and chaos ambient new sources of inspiration.

A prolific author of corrosive and dark humor, translated to more than 40 countries, Etgar Keret, 53, one of the most popular writers of his generation in Israel, explains how the pandemic shattered the "force of inertia" of ordinary life, exploding his inspiration.

"The Covid epidemic corresponds to one of the most prolific periods of my life," he explains in an interview with AFP, in the living room of his bright little apartment in Tel Aviv.

In the entrance, next to a black and white photo of his mother, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and deceased for several years, hangs the poster for the film "Les Méduses", Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2007 , written and directed with his wife, Shira Geffen.

"Life is usually a series of actions dictated by compulsive behavior that prompts us to do and do the same thing over and over again. The Covid has broken this force of inertia," he said.

"It's like a big slap in the face. All of a sudden, we see more, things that we did not see before, like a horse from which we have torn its blinders," he adds.

- "Victim narrative" -

Since the first period of confinement in Israel in March, Etgar Keret has not stopped writing, as if to ward off the horrors of the pandemic with his crazy news.

In "Why Leave This Wonderful Life?"

(published in Liberation in April), he imagines himself a victim of recurrent insomnia during which he fantasizes his own death from asthma - the author is indeed suffering from asthma -, infected by the new coronavirus.

The loneliness and isolation caused by confinement run through "Eating olives at the end of the world" ("Eating olives at the end of the world", The New York Review of Books, April 2020, Editor's note), in which a cashier supermarket, devastated by the inability to take her grandson in her arms, demands to be paid in hugs.

These themes also run through "Outside" (New York Times Magazine, July 2020), a surreal fable about a post-confinement world in which citizens are unable to resume their usual activities and decide to stay at home.

Etgar Keret also collaborated with the choreographer Inbal Pinto in the making of a short film, an adaptation of his text "Outside", subtitled in several languages ​​including French.

It features a panicked dancer, locked in a chaotic apartment, who tries in vain to communicate with the authoritarian narrator, prisoner of a television screen, ordering him to leave her home.

Originally designed for the web, the film was also screened in Times Square, at the Shibuya junction in Tokyo and on the wall of the Israeli national theater Habima in Tel Aviv.

Explaining his seemingly paradoxical renewal of inspiration at such a difficult time for the mind, Etgar Keret says he does not find himself "in the victim narrative" of many artists explaining "how much better life was before".

- A rough world -

"I don't think the world was perfect and that it was taken from us, I think it was bad enough already and now we maybe have a chance to improve it," he said.

He quotes his father, a survivor like his mother of the Shoah: "My father said that even if he obviously preferred easy times, it is in difficult times that we learn the most about ourselves and that, in retrospect, it is 'is the most interesting ".

"It is also valid now with the Covid", estimates the author while stressing that his "sources of inspiration are always negative".

"I write when I'm anxious, when I'm bored, when I'm angry," he continues.

“When the going is crappy, like now with the Covid and its share of anxiety, frustration and uncertainty, that's when I think of a joke or a story,” he says.

"Humor and creativity are for me like airbags in a virtual car. Writing is not the goal of my life, it is the best way I have found to deal with it", concludes -he.

© 2020 AFP