Everything is Illuminated: Safran Foer Jonathan - Softcover

Safran Foer, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141008253 ISBN 13: 9780141008257

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

Synopsis

Everything Is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel of a search for truth

The inspiration for the Liev Schreiber film, starring Elijah Wood

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a "blind" old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive -- a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war.

What they find turns all their worlds upside down . . .

'An astonishing feat of writing: hilariously funny and deeply serious, a gripping narrative. Extraordinary'The Times

'One of the most impressive novel debuts of recent years'Joyce Carol Oates, The Times Literary Supplement

'A first novel of startling originality'Jay McInerney, Observer

'Showy, smart. Made me laugh a lot'Susan Sontag, The Times Literary Supplement

'It seems hard to believe that such a young writer can have such a deep understanding of both comedy and tragedy'Erica Wagner, The Times

'A box of treasures'LA Times'

'Funny, life affirming, brilliant'Esquire

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977. He is the author of Everything is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book award; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is now a major film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock; and Eating Animals. He is also the editor of A Convergence of Birds.

About this title

Review

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 bitch, 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 and Latka from the US television series Taxi. (Sentences such as "It is mammoth honour for me write for a writer, especially when he is American writer, like Ernest Hemingway"; "It is bad and popular habit for people in Ukraine to take things without asking" are the norm.) Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by "Safran Foer"--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the Shetl 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. Admittedly he has an annoying habit of capitalising great chunks of text, but minor typographical nuances are easy to ignore in a book that combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship and loss. --Travis Elborough

Review

'An astonishing feat' The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141008253
• ISBN 13: 9780141008257
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288