Product Description

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is the story of a young man who visits the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. In turns hilarious and harrowing, lit with a manic energy, it is narrated in part by a Ukranian translator, who has a murderous approach to the English language, in part by the young man, who reanimates the lives of his grandfather and ancestors. Eventually the past meets the present, as fiction collides with reality in an unforgettable climax. With breathtaking inventiveness and narrative control, Jonathan Safran Foer has written a book about searching - for people and places that no longer exist, for a lost history - that reaches heights of comic mayhem and heartrending tragedy in equal measure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #332792 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 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

Review
Jonathan Safran Foer's first book is a dazzling display of linguistic virtuosity; at times confusing, occasionally irritating in its self-consciousness, this is a challenging, exciting novel from an exhilarating young writer. It consists of disparate strands which are skilfully woven together to create a work of intense richness. The main storyline is young Jonathan Safran Foer's search for the mysterious Augustine, a woman rumoured to have rescued his grandfather from the Nazis. All Jonathan has to go on is a crumpled photograph and some fragmentary maps. Foer is helped in his search by his Ukrainian guide and translator, Alex Perchov, who accompanies Jonathan on his quest, but also brings with him his perpetually 'reposing' grandfather and a flatulent bitch by the outlandish name of Sammy Davies Junior Junior. Alex is obsessed by the English language, and an early present of a thesaurus plays havoc with his conversational skills. He not only mauls the language, he positively tortures it, with the enthusiasm of a modern-day Mrs Malaprop, giving rise to such expressions as 'between a rock and a rigid (hard) place' and 'it captured (took) five very long hours'. Jonathan is also in the process of writing the historical account of what happened to his ancestors in the little shtetl of Trachimbrod. His history begins with the bizarre circumstances of his great-great-great-great-great grandmother's birth; her parents were drowned in the river Brod at the very moment she was born. The historical sections have an air of stereotypical Jewish humour about them, and there is even an air of Swiftian influence with the two rival religious factions, the Slouchers and the Uprights, recalling the Big-Endian/Little-Endian dispute in Gulliver's Travels. The illumination of the title is horrifyingly and graphically revealed, as the historical search seems set on a collision course with the 20th century. The truth about the Nazi atrocities in Trachimbrod is shocking, and the images Foer conjures up will remain etched on every reader's subconscious. Foer sets himself the unenviable task of creating a work where the style is as important as the substance. It is an indication of his power that he only rarely becomes swamped by the language to the detriment of his plot. This is a stirring debut from an exciting new voice. (Kirkus UK)

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

Great premise
If the premise of EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED doesn't grab you from the beginning, you're dead from the neck up: A young man, named Jonathan Safran Foer, travels to the Ukraine to find the person who saved his grandfather. This sets him on a journey that is filled with humour, sadness, family secrets, and total weirdness that all meshes together to make a complete and satisfying whole. More than a few have commented on this being very "Marquez-like" in that it transports the reader back to the eighteenth century in parts and has a dream-like quality. Alex Perchov, another character in the book, narrates part of Foer's history as he doubles as tour guide, sounding stragely like "Borat" at times, and just about as funny. Told with multiple voices, I was reminded of the nove Bark of the Dogwood more than once, not only for this reason but because the narrator in that book delves back into his own family's history in much the same way. EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is a one-of-a-kind book, and Foer is an American genius.

Everything is Unbearablely Smart
Everything is Unbearably Smart.

This novel I picked up with out any preconceptions, and without anything to colour my interpretations. But there was a lot of praise printed in and on the covers, and Elijah Wood looked out at me from front image, so as I started I anticipated an interesting read, worthy of not scant praise, and a film interpretation, and that it was, in places.

I'll be honest when I say that by the end I was willing it to finish. I was tired of Safran Foer's typographic gymnastics, and the rambling narrative. There are moments of cutting poignancy, and occasions when I was charmed by the clever prose. But the charm of the character Alex's broken English wears off - it just becomes labourious, a critisicm that could be levied against the whole book. Safran Foer seems to take great pleasure in twisting up syntax and grammar, idiom, turn of phrase, and turning it on its head. Sometimes his sentences are so inward looking they seem palindromic. You read it and think, 'Well that's a smart bit of linguistic contortion, but I hate you for putting my through it, page after page, chapter after chapter'. By the end of this book, I was blinded from the posthumously evident sadness and power of the narrative because of the tortuous language use. Don't get me wrong, I'm no prescriptivist when it comes to language use, but I get the feeling with this book that Safran Foer isn't playing with language for the good of the story, but for his own cryptic pleasure.

So this morning I finished the book, and I sighed with relief. I think this author is a brave one, and perhaps greatness will follow, but this was not a masterwork.

Everything is hype-enated
If you dare to set foot in any bookshop, you will find yourself confronted by the flashy cover of this book. Its eyes will follow you around the room. Looking inside the jacket, you will find yourself bludgeoned into buying it by snatches of effusive praise from what seems like a thousand learned people.

The funniest quotation is the one that hysterically compares the author's use of language with that of Anthony Burgess in 'A Clockwork Orange'. Burgess utilised his linguistic prowess in that book to create a convincing style of language with the careful use of various forms of slang and words of Russian origin. The author here takes one joke - an imitation of the poor English ability of a Ukrainian - and stretches it over the whole book. The effect is sometimes relatively funny, but it is much closer, in terms of quality, originality and intellectual content, to Avid Merrion in 'Bo Selector' than it is to Burgess's classic novel.

The sections set in the past are sometimes quite moving, but they are tainted slightly by a grating authorial cleverness that is always too overtly apparent in the writing. For me, cleverness in a book should be behind the scenes, unnoticeable, driving the story without getting in the way. There are also instances of embarrassing pretentiousness, such as the long passage about people making love creating a light visible from the heavens.

'Everything is Illuminated' is the work of a promising new author who may or may not produce a good novel in the future. The overenthusiastic praise for this book is bemusing, and it suggests that the American literary scene is so starved that the critics have been driven hysterical with the need for a saviour. In the words of Public Enemy, 'Don't believe the hype'.