Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4183 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

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

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

Customer Reviews

Fantastic!
This book is funny, touching and just generally beautiful. I usually pass my books on to friends but I'm keeping this one to read again and again.

An unusual style
Chosen as a book group read, at least half the members gave up because of the language. Those of us who persevered actually quite enjoyed it.
The language is supposed to be a Ukrainian's idea of well spoken English - based on a severe overuse and misunderstanding of the Thesaurus.
This was quite cleverly done, however, and gave rise to a few chuckles throughout the book.

The story is based around a visit made by an American, coincidentally called Jonathan Safran Foer, to the Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod, to track down the woman who saved his Jewish father from the Nazis. He hires Alexander as guide and interpreter. They are accompanied by Alexander's supposedly blind grandfather as driver and a truly disgusting dog.
The narrative is revealed through letters written between JSF and Alexander as they piece together a story that is ostensibly fiction but is based on the atrocities of the war and the history of Trachimbrod over the preceding 200 or so years.

According to an interview with the author, he did make such a trip to the Ukraine but found nothing at all, no evidence of the village and no living relatives or contacts. The visit did, however, produce a rather unusual piece of fiction!

Having been assured by other reviewers that his second novel is even better, I look forward to the author's more recent book.

Quirky and Moving
I read Safran Foer's books back to front. Absolutely loving his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which was my favourite read of last year. I was expecting great things from this novel, and was slightly disappointed. It still has many of the same quirky qualities of the second novel, with unusual layout, type changes and text patterns, but seems more disjointed than the second novel, more raw.

The story is of a young American man's travels to the Ukraine to search for the woman he thinks rescued his grandfather from the Nazis in WW2. It is a split narrative, ricocheting between the man's fictionalised account of his findings and the writing of his Ukrainian guide Sasha, who writes letters to him in America about their travels.

It is funny in places but also terribly sad, not just because of the Holocaust material, but also because of Sasha's poignant self awakening and move into manhood throughout the duration of the novel. If I had read this first I would probably have given it five stars, but Safran Foer gets better as a writer, so if you like this you must read the follow up.