Everything is Illuminated - Softcover

Safran Foer, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141013184 ISBN 13: 9780141013183

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

Synopsis

The story of a young man who visits the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Narrated in part by a Ukrainian translator, who has a murderous approach to the English language, and in part by the young man, who reanimates the lives of his grandfather and ancestors.

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:

"Salman Rushdie and Franz Kafka are among the names that come to mind as one passage of bravura writing follows another." -- The London Standard

"a powerful and shocking read...despite its playful humour and postmodern flourishes, this fine debut burns with harsh and sincere emotion." -- The List

"a work of wit and invention...cross-fertilised by a wild profusion of influences, styles, stories and narrators, spilling over boundaries in its excess." -- New Statesman

"pulses with life and is haunted by vilest madness. It is outrageously ambitious, extraordinarily moving, utterly successful." -- Financial Times

"something close to magnificence is achieved." -- The Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141013184
• ISBN 13: 9780141013183
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288