Crazy Glue: romantic or horrifying?

[Absurd-Adjuster]

Reread Etgar Keret’s “Crazy Glue” and I still can’t decide whether the ending is romantic, horrifying, or only funny because it refuses to choose.

What I admire most is how little space it needs. The metaphor becomes literal and somehow that makes it less neat, not more.

Where do people land on it? And does the story work because of the ending, or was it already working before that?

[Paperback-Postpunk]

Romantic, but by maybe half an inch.

It doesn’t fix anything. It just lets them be ridiculous together for one second, which is a different thing

[Marginalia]

That is why “romantic” still works for me. Not redemption. Suspension.

The story stops before anyone can convert the moment into a lesson

[Folklore]

horror for me lol

funny horror, but still. any marriage that needs industrial adhesive is already into specialist maintenance

[Prison Book Bars]

I don’t think the choice is necessary. The joke depends on the two readings remaining available.

Once you decide it is only sweet or only frightening, it becomes a much smaller story.

[Quiet Stacks]

Yes. And thankfully he never stops to explain the metaphor to us.

Another paragraph of interpretation would ruin it

[Briefs And Books]

The point of view matters a great deal to me.

We spend enough time inside his ordinary certainty that when the story becomes impossible, the prose does not need to announce the change. It simply keeps going.

[Absurd-Adjuster]

Exactly. No magical-realism trumpet blast.

The impossible thing gets the same tone as everything else, and that makes it funnier

[Paperback-Postpunk]

The length is doing a lot too.

Another page and I think the whole thing dies. It needs to leave while the image still has charge

[Marginalia]

I was about to say I could tolerate one more sentence at the end.

Then I imagined one and changed my mind.

[Folklore]

this is why editing committees are dangerous

[Prison Book Bars]

Does anyone find the last image sentimental?

I did on first reading. On the second, much less. I think I had supplied more reassurance than the story actually gives us.

[Briefs And Books]

Only if you assume the moment lasts.

The story gives contact. It does not give prognosis.

[Quiet Stacks]

I don’t assume anything lasts in Keret

[Absurd-Adjuster]

The commercial premise has aged strangely well too.

An advertising claim becomes an emotional test, which sounds ridiculous when I write it out and completely normal inside the story.

[Paperback-Postpunk]

And the funniest part is that the sales pitch is treated with more skepticism than the marriage

[Marginalia]

I also like how little access we get to her interior life.

That could have made her feel thin, but for me it does the opposite. She remains the person he has failed to understand, including at the end.

[Prison Book Bars]

Agreed. Explaining her would make the story more balanced in a workshop sense and much worse as a story.

[Briefs And Books]

His skepticism is useful because it is so confident.

He keeps treating disbelief as intelligence, right up until disbelief stops being an available position.

[Folklore]

he has that very specific male confidence that the universe will keep backing him up

bad investment

[Quiet Stacks]

That confidence is what makes the ending work for me. For once he has no useful explanation and no superior position.

[Absurd-Adjuster]

Does anyone think the story is mainly about infidelity?

I don’t. It matters, obviously, but it feels more like pressure in the room than the actual subject.

[Paperback-Postpunk]

Same. If you reduce it to cheating husband gets lesson, the story becomes painfully tidy.

Keret is better than the lesson

[Marginalia]

Yes. I think estrangement is closer to it.

Whether surprise can interrupt estrangement is the question I keep hearing underneath the joke.

[Prison Book Bars]

Or whether interruption is enough.

The story is smart enough to leave before answering that.

[Briefs And Books]

Exactly. Contact, not prognosis.

[Quiet Stacks]

That may be the cleanest description of the ending in this thread.

[Briefs And Books]

I am now regretting saying it in public.

[Author]

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