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Everything is Illuminated - Softcover

 
9780670917518: Everything is Illuminated
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Everything Is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel of a search for truth,published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

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

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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

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  • PublisherPenguin Books Ltd
  • Publication date2010
  • ISBN 10 0670917516
  • ISBN 13 9780670917518
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages288
  • Rating

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780141008257: Everything is Illuminated: Safran Foer Jonathan

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780141008257
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