Everything Is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

published

June 5th 2003 (first published 2006) by Penguin Books Ltd

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binding

Paperback, 288 pages

isbn

0141008253 (isbn13: 9780141008257)

description

The simplest thing would be to describe Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. I...more

[close] 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 [close]

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Mike rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

09/03/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in August, 2007

I watched the movie of this first and loved it. It was basically a movie about cultural misunderstanding and how people can be cruel without really knowing it. It is a story about what happens when you put an American and someone born out of the Soviet era in the same room and try to make them explain to one another why the other one thinks the way they do. In a word: hilarious.

After reading the book, I still like the movie, but it seems obvious to me that the filmmakers missed the point ...more I watched the movie of this first and loved it. It was basically a movie about cultural misunderstanding and how people can be cruel without really knowing it. It is a story about what happens when you put an American and someone born out of the Soviet era in the same room and try to make them explain to one another why the other one thinks the way they do. In a word: hilarious.

After reading the book, I still like the movie, but it seems obvious to me that the filmmakers missed the point entirely. The book, while still a hilarious exploration of an American immersed in post-Soviet culture, is so much deeper and weirder.

The story is (sort of) about the author, Jonathan Safran Foer. He is an aspiring writer in his early 20s who travels to Ukraine to try to find the small Jewish village of Trachimbrod where his grandfather grew up and to find the woman who helped him escape the Nazis during the war. He speaks no Ukrainian or Russian, and his only maps of the area are 60 years old, so he enlists the help of Alexander, an Odessa native of about the same age, his blind grandfather, who acts as their driver (if you have read any modern Russian literature you will understand not to question this kind of thing) and their deranged seeing-eye bitch Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

Half of the story (the half on which the movie is based) is ostensibly written by Alex. He write in English with an accent, in that (I assume) it was written, then rewritten by looking up every third word in the thesaurus and replacing it with the least appropriate synonym. This section is a humorous, touching, narrative touching on the nature of friendship, grief and regret, among other things. It is accessible and easy to understand.

The other half (which is entirely ignored by the movie) is written by Jonathan, and covers the history of the village from the day it got its name in 1791 until its destruction by the Nazis in 1941, following the exploits of his ancestors. All of these sections have a very surreal quality. They jump around in time, different eras have glimpses into the past and future. Everything that happens is completely bizarre and makes no sense. It explores much more difficult topics, such as the nature of life, love, and art, and is in general much more philosophical and harder to get your head around.

These sections are split by letters from Alexander to Jonathan commenting on Jonathan's sections and introducing his own next section.

The weird thing about this book is that, at least for me, it gets frustrating to read the author's crazy attempts at philosophy. He wanders around so much, it seems like he is trying to write a little mini-story for every emotion he's every experienced in his entire life. Normally, I would discard a book like this and say, "Well, it's a young author's overeager first attempt, and he tried to cover too much." However, there are so many parts in Alex's letters and narrative where these things are addressed (once Jonathan says something like, "I want to be a writer, but I'm not good yet.") and Alex asks a lot of questions like Why do you write like this? and Why did you have the characters do that? The incoherence of it all becomes a part of the greater logic of the novel, which in turn provides an answer to the question, "Why did Jewish people stay in Poland and Ukraine when they knew the Nazis were coming?" This books answer, I imagine, would be, "Because nothing anyone did in the village's 150 year history made sense, why should they have done the sensible thing in 1941?"

The book is hilarious, moving and disturbing among other things. I can't help but be annoyed by its weird narrative and pointless philosophical musings, but given that it bathes itself in its own strangeness, it raises itself up and becomes a pretty awesome book....less

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Hannah rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

10/27/07

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: The Word Everyone Doesn't Quite Match Who I would Recommend this To.

This could easily be my favorite book. I'll tell you why, but first let me explain a few things.

[One:] The book can be described has having three parts. Sort of. Sections of it are written by Alex. You should know that Alex is Ukrainian and speaks English as a second language. It is very obvious that English is his second language.

[Two:] Alex works in his family's tour-guide type business. They have an American client named Jonathan who comes to Ukraine to study things for a book he's ...more This could easily be my favorite book. I'll tell you why, but first let me explain a few things.

[One:] The book can be described has having three parts. Sort of. Sections of it are written by Alex. You should know that Alex is Ukrainian and speaks English as a second language. It is very obvious that English is his second language.

[Two:] Alex works in his family's tour-guide type business. They have an American client named Jonathan who comes to Ukraine to study things for a book he's writing. He's searching for a woman who saved his family during the holocaust. After he goes back to America, he and Alex write letters. The sections of the book that are italicized are letters that Alex has written to Jonathan.

[Three:] There are other parts of the book that have a wavy heading and a date on them. This is the story of Jonathan's ancestors. These parts are my favorite. Though it's not clearly stated, I like to think of these sections as the book Jonathan is writing.

In the beginning Alex is very arrogant. It's hard to read because Alex uses words out of context, wanting to use the word with the most syllables. A good example is that he uses the word rigid instead of hard. "I was stuck between a rock and a rigid place." After a while it's comical, but it takes some getting used to.

I think it takes a genius to write in any language and make it seem as though he didn't grow up speaking it.

As with most smart people, Jonathan is notably awkward. That's the best way to describe him.

My favorite character in the book is Jonathan's Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great (Give or take a few Greats) Grandmother. She is found floating after her father crashes his carriage in The River Brod. No one knows who she is-Both of her parents die-and they elect Yankel to raise her. He's a sad sad man. I appreciate this part of the book because of the way Yankel talks to her as an infant, and as she grows up.

It's very progressive. You see the characters grow, and I like that in a book. I like to see things and people improving, and that's what happens here. I felt like a wiser person upon finishing....less

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Robert rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

01/23/08

bookshelves: finished, owned-and-gave-away

Read in July, 2003

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Dutton, 2002)

My, what a clever novel!

In any case, that, I imagine, is what Jonathan Safran Foer kept saying as he was writing this. And really, much about it is clever. The comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are completely unwarranted, as Alex, Foer's Ukrainian hero, destroys the English language in a quite different way than does Burgess' Alex. (A less politically correct but more conceptually accurate comparison would be Charlie Chan, as writ...more Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Dutton, 2002)

My, what a clever novel!

In any case, that, I imagine, is what Jonathan Safran Foer kept saying as he was writing this. And really, much about it is clever. The comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are completely unwarranted, as Alex, Foer's Ukrainian hero, destroys the English language in a quite different way than does Burgess' Alex. (A less politically correct but more conceptually accurate comparison would be Charlie Chan, as written by Earl Derr Biggers.) Foer's intertwining of stories is also quite clever, and his use of the two narrators to tell the main storylines.

However, with all the cleverness going on, Foer seems to have forgotten in many places to actually insert a novel. Threads pick up in odd places and then die with no fanfare, never to be resurrected again; the story has holes without being told an enough of an impressionist way to allow the reader to fill in enough blanks; the characters are obviously there as vehicles to carry off the cleverness, instead of being fully-realized human beings. In other words, this is a linguistic roller coaster, not a novel.

Not to say Foer doesn't write well when he forgets about the tricks and applies himself. Especially in the novel's last eighty pages, there are scenes of great beauty and tragedy that are conveyed in powerful manner that make the reader sit up and take notice. (The emotionl impact of every last one of them is dramatically undercut by Foer's following each with a needlessly scatological and/or pornographic piece of attempted humor, each of which fails because of its positioning, but the tragic pieces themselves are extremely well-written.) Unfortunately, these scenes are all too few. One of them is going along swimmingly until he decides to interject a Rick Moody-esque three-page unpunctuated sentence. Horrid. (And a trick he repeats a couple of times afterwards, also throwing in run-on words. Even more horrid.)

The book is billed as a comedy, and Foer tries to carry it off as such, but when the finest-written scenes are those of tragedy, it's hard to call it a success as attempted. Foer has the makings of a fine dramatic writer, once he gets away from being so consciously clever. ** ...less

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Jim rated it:

(review of isbn 0241141664)

05/17/08

Read in January, 2003

recommends it for: Those seeking fresh voices in literature

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

This brilliant debut novel by Jonathan Safran Foer is a deeply-felt imaginative achievement. It is wholly recommendable, even if it is only half of a good book. The half that is good--no, great--is so worthy as to overshadow the book's other half, which is, sad to say, an embarassing if rightly-intended misfire.

The half that is successful is the tale of the fictional Jonathan Safran Foer's search for the story of his ancestors. It is successful as a story, but especially in the way it is ...more This brilliant debut novel by Jonathan Safran Foer is a deeply-felt imaginative achievement. It is wholly recommendable, even if it is only half of a good book. The half that is good--no, great--is so worthy as to overshadow the book's other half, which is, sad to say, an embarassing if rightly-intended misfire.

The half that is successful is the tale of the fictional Jonathan Safran Foer's search for the story of his ancestors. It is successful as a story, but especially in the way it is told, in the hilarious, fractured, malapropriate voice of Alex, the Ukrainian translator/guide. Alex's way of speaking jumps instantly into the pantheon of great narratorial voices in literature, right next to Huckleberry Finn, to whom the technique hugely owes allegiance. Foer is doing the Twain bit of putting his story in the mouth of of a speaker of "substandard English," and of letting this voice become, eventually, poetic and utterly profound. It is a great and a wonderful achievement.

Part of what is terrific about this is that Alex's voice changes throughout the course of the narrative, as he learns more correct English from his writer-idol, Foer. So the book shows not only a narrative arc, but a corresponding arc of style as well.

The Alex-spoken chapters alternate with the supposed novel about his ancestors which the fictional Foer is writing, and which Alex progressively comments on when his sections come around again. Unfortunately, the quaint story of the ancestors in their small village doesn't have the brilliance of Alex's parts. This whole section of the novel reads like a Jewish folktale, full of magical-realist touches, but somehow it doesn't have a stamp of truth or real honesty to it. it comes off as cloying and precious, to tell the truth.

It might be argued that this quality was a very deliberate choice by the author. The idea here, completely supported by the novel as a whole, would be that the real story of the ancestors and their destruction in the holocaust is so harrowing that it cannot and should not be remembered by the fictional Foer. So instead, he creates this folktale version of events, with wild and magical characters and so forth.

Sure, I see that. I know that that is part of what is going on. The contrast between the story as told and the harrowing history as we eventually discover it it huge. But for me, it didn't work. The magical-realist nostalgia sections have to have an integrity and an honesty at their heart. And these are lacking in that, lacking in some deeply-felt spirit that would connect them with reality. They seem cartoony. They are trying way too hard. This is not Isaac Bashevis Singer, but is trying hard to be, and the attempt becomes embarassing after awhile.

The film version of the novel very rightly left out this half of the story entirely, and was very true to Alex's narrative. It worked, I thought, quite well.

As I said at the outset, though, the Alex parts are so well done, so strong and funny and well-told, that they carry the novel. Though only half-successful, this is a very good book. ...less

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Matt rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

07/10/07

Read in June, 2007

I actually wrote a review for this book the night I finished it, but the writing of said review happened to coincide with goodreads deciding to go down for site maintenance. We late owls never get any relief.

So this book. Yeah, it starts off good enough...it's quite humorous in places, but... I'm going to avoid using the more literary word 'contrived' here, and instead suggest that this book just tries too damn hard. Once you get past the novelty of the butchered language that Alex write...more

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Graeme rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

05/03/08

Read in April, 2008

This gets an extra star for a truly funny gag that carries the book for the first fifty or sixty pages. That's surprising and impressive mileage for a simple bit (the narrator, a non-native English speaker, relies heavily on a thesaurus, so that "a hard journey" is "a rigid journey"), but after it wears off -- grinding agony.

Foer wants to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his magic is insipid and his realism is lazily dishonest. He consistently goes for an easy lie over a ...more

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Brian rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

09/12/08

bookshelves: totally-awesome-books

Read in August, 2008

recommended to Brian by: Sammyatmiami
recommends it for: everyone

If I haven't layed out my good-book-philosophy yet, then I'll do it here. It needs to be done some time, or else any reviews I write would be somewhat out of context. So, here goes:

To me, there are two main parts, or aspects, of a book. One is the story, and the other is the way it is written. When I say "story", I mean everything that happens in the book, as it would happen in real life (or some other life, in sci-fi), while the "way it is written" is, of course, the wor...more

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Martine rated it:

01/17/08

bookshelves: film, magic-realism, modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern

Read in January, 2004

I'm not sure how I feel about this, one of the most overhyped novels of the early noughties. On the one hand, it undeniably contains flashes of genius. It is original, inventive and ambitious, which is great. On the other hand, it has a few aspects which annoyed me, and that, I think, is less good.

In a nutshell, Everything Is Illuminated is an amalgam of three interconnected stories. The first is that of a young Jewish American (bearing the same name as the author) who visits the Ukra...more I'm not sure how I feel about this, one of the most overhyped novels of the early noughties. On the one hand, it undeniably contains flashes of genius. It is original, inventive and ambitious, which is great. On the other hand, it has a few aspects which annoyed me, and that, I think, is less good.

In a nutshell, Everything Is Illuminated is an amalgam of three interconnected stories. The first is that of a young Jewish American (bearing the same name as the author) who visits the Ukraine in an attempt to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis and without whom he himself would never have been born. This part of the story is told by Alex, the flashy young Ukrainian who serves as Jonathan's interpreter. Alex's subsequent letters to Jonathan, written in a bizarre, highly ornate and seriously mangled kind of English, make up the second storyline. Finally, the third storyline consists of the magic-realist novel Jonathan writes about life in his grandfather's Jewish village before the Nazis destroyed it. Together, the three storylines tell a tale of friendship, guilt, family secrets, atrocities, opportunities, dreams and ways of dealing with drama which is at turns funny and shocking and occasionally beautifully nostalgic.

As I said, there is much about the book that is to be admired. Foer is undeniably a gifted writer. He relishes his stories and has a lot of fun sharing them with the reader. Sadly, though, he is rather uneven, following passages of great beauty (especially towards the end of the book) with scenes which are so crass that they completely ruin the effect. He also tries a bit too hard to be clever and original, coming up with gimmicks and typographical idiosyncrasies which are interesting at first but do rather distract from the narrative. And then there's the book's main gimmick, which is Alex' mangled English. While frequently funny, it is also entirely unconvincing from a linguistic point of view, and I'm enough of a linguist to care about such things. Halfway through the book I got so fed up with Alex' overwritten language that I began to dread his parts of the narrative. I doubt that was Foer's intention.

So. Yeah. It's an interesting tale, but I wish Foer had waited a few years before telling it. I'm pretty sure he'll mature into an excellent author; this story just happened to come a bit too early in his career to live up to the hype.
...less

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Books Ring My Bell rated it:

(review of isbn 0241141664)

03/06/08

Read in March, 2008

if you can see from someone's comments, it took me awhile to get through this book. No, it's not war and peace. I found it amusing in some parts and others were kind of slow for me... the humor is warped, but i like that in an author!

I believe this was his first novel - and I have to give him props for that - a solid effort.

I enjoyed it, but not enough to read it straight thru. other books got in the way... I have this book problem, you see.

Hey, I can quit anytime I want!
really.
...more

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Nils rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

07/13/07

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: twenty-somethings

I could go on and on about how what is clever at 25 grows less so as we age, about how metafiction resonates more with young men who have yet to face the issues that do have enduring meaning in life (durational love, children, divorce, death), about how tapping into the Holocaust for emotional weight seems increasingly to be cheating. But enough. There are already mixed reviews that discuss the limits of this novel. Read those. Smart but not especially emotionally or psychologically interest...more

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Ben rated it:

07/19/07

Sorry but I didn't care for this at all. If Mr. Nobody wrote a book about himself as the main character, and used some uninventive malapropisms to make discussions with a foreigner amusing, the book would be tossed. But wait, Foer went to Yale. Unfortunately for me the quality of his writing shows me that nepotism will always beat out merit these days. Sorry to be harsh, but really, I found the writing to be quite poor.

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Tova rated it:

02/28/07

I think Jonathan Safron Foer (sp?)is greatly overrated.

I felt like he was constantly saying, "ooh, aren't i smart, isn't that clever? do you like that?" he was too close to his material somehow.

I also felt compelled after reading this to do some writing of my own. His voice is being heard, now, where's a voice that i feel speaks for me, for my experience. hopefully that will yet happen!

tt

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Beth rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

09/24/08

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Probably in the top 3 best books I've read in the past 5 years. It is not an easy book to read, and it is at times bizarre and vaguely offensive. But it is also hearbreaking and heartwarming and funny thought-provoking.

Weirdly, I actually wrote a review of this book for something right after I read it:

Finishing this book was one of the oddest reading experiences I've ever had. I literally sat and thought about it for about thirty-five minutes, just flipping back over certain parts, cons...more Probably in the top 3 best books I've read in the past 5 years. It is not an easy book to read, and it is at times bizarre and vaguely offensive. But it is also hearbreaking and heartwarming and funny thought-provoking.

Weirdly, I actually wrote a review of this book for something right after I read it:

Finishing this book was one of the oddest reading experiences I've ever had. I literally sat and thought about it for about thirty-five minutes, just flipping back over certain parts, considering possible interpretations. And any book that can throw me into such deep meditation is most definitely worth talking about. This is the interpretation of the book that I came away with:

Throughout the novel, Jonathan is referred to as the "hero" by Sasha/Alex (I'll just call him Sasha from here on out). But I believe that Sasha ends up being the real hero. I don't think that Jonathan becomes some sort of terrible person, but it is telling that Jonathon and Sasha stop writing to each other. I believe it is because Sasha has come away with a much deeper understanding of himself from their trip, while Jonathan seems to have mostly come away with good writing material. Sasha becomes so angry with Jonathon's story because it is not truthful in the way that Sasha is truthful. Jonathan wants to take pieces of what he knows for sure, and embellish and expound and fictionalize it to make enticing fiction. In doing so, he does make his grandfather out to be a pretty bizarre person, taking only his supposition that his grandfather had a dead arm and a lot of teeth as a baby, and looking through his journal, and then making up this whole ridiculous story about how the Safran had affairs with over 2,000 women because they were strangely attracted to the dead arm. Sasha, on the other hand, comes away from the trip with a better understanding of, and deeper love for, his grandfather, and a commitment to truth. He realizes the value of truth in seeing what his grandfather had to live with and in coming clean on certain aspects of his life. For instance, he admits that he is a virgin, though he boasted in the beginning of how many women he was "carnal" with. And he is not especially tall, as he also boasted about in the beginning. He also embraces his love for Ukraine, giving his savings away and deciding to stay there and take care of his family. And he is finally able to stand up to his drunken father and banish him from the family.

So, I believe that the title refers to the way the past illuminates the present, and the present illuminates the past. But differently for our two "heroes". For Jonathan, he has found the material he needs to become the writer he believes he was born to be. For Sasha, he has found the truth he needs to become the man he wants to be. You could argue the levels of nobility of each. Jonathan writes everything down, documents the names on all of Lista's boxes, reads guidebooks on properly dealing with Ukrainians. Sasha listens to the stories, takes it all in, doesn't think to worry about each little detail to remember forever. Sasha is more concerned with understanding the heart of the truth, in short, while Jonathon wants the material to use later. In one final thought, I remember that Ernest Hemingway was mentioned at some point in the novel, I believe by Sasha in talking about Jonathan becoming a great American writer. I took an American Lit class in which we discussed the novel Garden of Eden by Hemingway, and the way in which Hemingway addressed the guilt of the writer who puts themselves and those they love in emotionally reckless positions in order to create good writing material. I just thought it was interesting that his name comes into this novel because of Jonathan's intentions. Not that Jonathan creates any sort of emotionally reckless situation, but he in some way sells out his family history in order to write an interesting book....less

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Lucy rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

06/03/08

Read in June, 2008

This book is hard to piece together. It's even harder to write about.

If Everything Is Illuminated had to be categorized onto one shelf, I'd assign it a spot alongside other books about the holocaust. Or maybe about love. No, it's about friendship. Scratch that...it's really about loneliness.

Whatever it actually is about, Jonathan Safran Foer seems to be too odd of a man, and definitely too odd of an author, to define the book or narrow its focus. The minute the reader does, Foer changes ...more This book is hard to piece together. It's even harder to write about.

If Everything Is Illuminated had to be categorized onto one shelf, I'd assign it a spot alongside other books about the holocaust. Or maybe about love. No, it's about friendship. Scratch that...it's really about loneliness.

Whatever it actually is about, Jonathan Safran Foer seems to be too odd of a man, and definitely too odd of an author, to define the book or narrow its focus. The minute the reader does, Foer changes the tempo and direction of the book. Sometimes, the stories of cruelty are cover-your-eyes horrible. Sometimes, the situations are uncomfortably obscene. Sometimes, the story and characters are folklorist-y bizarre. Sometimes, it's modern-age hilarious. A lot of the time, it's furrow-your-brow confusing. Everything definitely did not get illuminated for me.

With broad, sweeping strokes, I'll attempt to give a basic summary of the book. A young 20 year-old Jewish man, whose name also happens to be Jonathan Safran Foer, travels to the Ukraine in an attempt to track down a woman in a photograph named Augustine, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. To help him, he hires a tour guide/translator named Alex, whose English appears to have been mostly learned directly from a thesaurus. The nouns and verbs he chooses are almost always slightly off, but kind of, sort of close, and the reader is forced to translate almost all of Alex's narrative into actual English. Part of the book is written as letters from Alex to Jonathan as explanations for his translations and editions. Some of it is what the character Jonathan Safran Foer writes as his novel (after his return from his trip) and some of it is narrative of the actual trip, given by Alex. When the parts are put together as a whole novel, the reader is forced to be quite patient and thorough to finish the book actually understanding all of what happened, and even more willing to be content with its loose ends that will never be tied.

While Alex's broken English can certainly be funny, it slows down the pace of the novel (because it's impossible to read it fast) too much. Thankfully, his conversational skills do improve and his letters to Jonathan towards the end are much more accessible. Additionally, because both Alex and Jonathan are young and male, there is quite a bit of sexual humor that turns out to be quite harmless, and even slightly endearing, but still makes the overall effect a bit R-rated.

There are so many characters to keep track of and I'm not exactly certain if I figured out who was who and if they mattered. Ultimately, I think most didn't matter because, again, I think the take-home message is meant to be about the horrors of the holocaust and how good people can do bad things. If not, then I missed a whole lot.

If you do attempt this book, read it patiently. It might help to read it as part of a group effort. Then, perhaps if you're able to talk it through and everyone brings their own understanding into a collective whole, everything about this novel might actually BECOME illuminated....less

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Jule rated it:

(review of isbn 0141025271)

06/14/08

Read in January, 2006

recommended to Jule by: Meike

I liked the idea of the plot a lot: Young Jewish-American (Jonathan) travels to Ukraine to find his family's past. Ends up driving around with his interpreter Alex (bad English), Alex's grandfather (half-blind, nevertheless the designated driver), and their family dog (flatulent). Sounds hilarious. And it is! But that is only the smallest part of the novel. There are also historical sections (from waaay way back) about the village that Jonathan's grandfather (tiny little shtetl in the middle of ...more

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Elaine rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)

03/01/08

Read in March, 2008

Mixed feelings about this novel. Overall, I liked it and would recommend it to any fan of literary fiction, Jewish history, history in general, and genealogy. It's very different from the film, which slices out at least one-half of the novel: the backstory. The film is a well-done "road movie" set in the Ukraine and following the three main characters, Alex, Alex's grandfather Sasha, and Jonathan, as they search for the elusive town of Trachimbrod. The novel, however, is less focused o...more

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Sarah rated it:

02/27/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: anyone who doesn't mind an unconventional structure and sometimes pretentious prose

This book has all the makings of a great heroic quest -
The hero? An American by the same name of the author
The task? Find the woman whose family saved his Grandfather from the Nazis.
Long perilous journey? through Ukraine seeking out Trachimbrod, a town that seems to no longer exist.
Side kick? Alex, our hero's young Ukrainian translator, whose has obsession for pop-culture and interesting interpretations of English idioms.

The book is structured as letters...more This book has all the makings of a great heroic quest -
The hero? An American by the same name of the author
The task? Find the woman whose family saved his Grandfather from the Nazis.
Long perilous journey? through Ukraine seeking out Trachimbrod, a town that seems to no longer exist.
Side kick? Alex, our hero's young Ukrainian translator, whose has obsession for pop-culture and interesting interpretations of English idioms.

The book is structured as letters between "the hero" Johnathan and Alex after Johnathan has returned back to the States. We never get Johnathan's version of the events that have unfolded, only his fictional account of what happened centuries ago in the town of Trachimbrod. Alex's letters narrate their journey to seek out Augustine (the young daughter of the family who saved his grandfather's life during the Holocaust) and also provides commentary on Johnathan's writing and commentary on Johnathan's commentary on Alex's writing.

If it sounds confusing - that's because it is. I picked this book up in the Melbourne airport for something to pass the time between Australia, New Zealand and home. I put it down as soon as I got back with really no intention of ever finishing it. It wasn't exactly airplane reading. "The hero's" fictional history of Trachimbrod was such an abstract and seeminly unconnectable subplot, and Alex's broken English was bordering on obnoxious. I gave it another chance though, because I am currently teaching Holocaust literature, so it seemed like a good time to finally finish the book.

I'm glad I did.

The plot picked up and regained purpose. The communications between Alex and Johnathan became poignant. At times I felt like a voyer reading these letters; Alex's honesty and self reflection is piercing. Somewhere along the way, his lack of a firm grasp on the English language actually enhances his ability to express the complexity of the human condition. Alex takes on a life and personality. I found myself feeling for him as I had during my first introduction to Holden Caufield. Don't get me wrong. I'm not equating Everything's Illuminated with Catcher in the Rye, but Johnathan Safran Foer has certainly created a character who will stay with me....less

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Heidi rated it:

(review of isbn 0060529709)