Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan Safran FoerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-23
ISBN: 0060792175
Number of pages: 276
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of Everything Is Illuminated
Book Review: Don't believe the anti-hype.
Summary: 5 Stars
This may be one of the most humorous tragedies I have read.
The novel is set up with three parts per chapter: the "main story" (as narrated by the established secondary character, who apparently learned English mostly from a thesaurus), the "other story" (by the author/title character, discussing his ancestral history of the past few hundred years, sex-lives and all), and a series of letters from the secondary character to the main character.
Many people found the English-as-a-second-language narration of the "main story" grating or even offensive, but this is ridiculous. It adds a truly alien aspect to the character, and some of what appear to be oddities in his speech are actually improvements on daily speech, upon second glance. Also, the masterful slaughter of the English language is strangely reminiscent of Nadsat (the slang in "A Clockwork Orange", for those unfamiliar). And please note: this novel was, in fact, WRITTEN AND RELEASED BEFORE THE MOVIE "BORAT." People love to claim that this novel is ripping off Borat's style of speech. Even if "Borat" came first, the styles are hardly comparable.
The "other story" contains many sexually graphic depictions, but none of them seem overdone or unnecessary. The world set up by Foer in the semi-fictional Ukrainian town of Trachimbrod is very unique, creative, and captivating. Many scenes, concepts, and stories from this section stick very hard with the reader, due to their collective strange, beautiful, and occasionally disturbing aesthetic. This may have been the most interesting part of the book, although its omission from the movie is very understandable.
Additionally, the letter series serves as a sort of epilogue that runs through the entire story.
Overall, this book is a great read. I will admit, however, there is a possibility that my opinion is slightly biased, due to my personal interest in the Slavic and Jewish cultures (both ubiquitous throughout the novel), as well as the fact that the singer of a band I listen to costarred in the film adaptation. I reasonably doubt this, though.
Anyway, I would suggest this novel to anyone looking for a dark, funny, and somewhat experimental story. If interested, one should definitely read the novel before seeing the movie. However, in my opinion, both forms of the story are amazing.
Summary of Everything Is Illuminated
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
By turns comic and tragic, but always passionate, wildly inventive, and touched with an indelible humanity, this debut novel is a powerful, deeply felt story of searching: for the past, family, and truth.
The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.
If all this sounds a little daunting, don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer who combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, and loss. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk
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