Jonathan
Safran Foer, Everything is illuminated
|
About
the Author
|
Jonathan
Safran Foer was born in 1977. He studied at Princeton where
he won the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Creative
Writing thesis prizes. He has also worked as a morgue assistant,
jewelry salesman, farm sitter and ghostwriter. Four years
ago, he traveled to the Ukraine to research his grandfather's
life. He was chosen as the Zoetrope: All Fiction Prize winner
(2000) and his short stories have appeared in the Paris Review
and Conjunctions. He is also the editor of The Convergence
of Birds, an anthology of fiction and poetry inspired by Joseph
Cornell's birdboxes, which was a Boston Globe bestseller and
a Book Sense '76 selection. An excerpt of Everything is illuminated
appeared in the New Yorker's debut fiction issue, eliciting
a huge response and a flood of letters from admiring readers.
Jonathan Foer grew up in Washington, DC and now lives in Queens.
He is currently at work on his second novel, which takes place
in a museum. |
Critics
/ Reviews
Everything
is illuminated is a funny, life-affirming novel about
connection. In this book, everyone and everything - history,
people, house pets, you name it - is gloriously, miraculously
connected. The book has three interweaving strands: the author's
search for a woman from a 50-year old photograph who may have
saved his grandfather from the Nazis; a novel within a novel
set in the 1700s in the Ukrainian town where the author's
ancestors lived; and the letters to the author from a Ukrainian
translator who butchers English as gleefully as Hyman Kaplan.
With each strand filled with unforgettable details - stars
are described as "silver nails," and a dog is named
Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior - this book is, as its name implies,
brilliant.
(Adrienne Miller in Esquire, April 2002)
More than
one English language is at work in Jonathan Safran Foer's
absolutely captivating book, Everything is illuminated.
The jubilantly fractured English of Ukrainian narrator Alex,
erstwhile guide, companion and correspondent named Jonathan
Safran Foer, is but a part of that. This book's real riches
(and they are many) lie in its astonishing range: of emotion,
humor, horror, an awareness of past and present, and a presence
that takes very certain words to say. Say them Jonathan Safran
Foer does: daringly, dauntingly, and deeply.
(Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Co.)
The marvelously
inventive Everything is illuminated documents the journey
a twenty-year-old Safran Foer (also the name of the author)
takes to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the
Nazis. Magic realism and brutal fact come together to reveal
an absurdist legend behind Jonathan's ancestral Polish shtetl,
and the harrowing truths about the grandfather he never met.
Foer offers a novel that is by turns laugh-out-loud hilarious,
heart-wrenching, and downright brilliant.
(Bookforum)
It may
be a pretentious title for a 24-year-old's first novel, but
nearly everything about this remarkable book is illuminated.
There are two plots here. The first is the story of Jonathan
Safran Foer, who travels to the Ukraine hoping to find Augustine,
the woman who helped save his grandmother from the Nazis.
Jonathan; his Ukranian translator, Alexi (who narrates much
of the novel in a hilarious broken English); Alexi's grandfather;
and the family dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior, all grow to
love Augustine on their mad and hopeless search for her. The
second story follows the history of one family in Trachimbrod,
the shtetl for which Alexi and Jonathan are searching. Beginning
in the eighteenth century with the miraculous appearance of
a baby girl, Brod, the sad story of Trachimbrod culminates
in the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Although there's plenty
of lyrical acrobatics here, with exquisite magic realism intermingling
with Alexi's uproarious narration, it's the emotional depth
of the characters that stands out, from the 613 distinct varieties
of sadness observed by young Brod to the remarkable transcontinental
friendship of Alexi and Jonathan. Foer, the editor of A Convergence
of Birds (2001), a collection of stories and poems inspired
by Joseph Cornell's bird boxes, may be young, but he's no
pretender.
(John Green, Booklist)
It's hard
to get through the first chapters of Everything Is Illuminated.
The problem is, you keep laughing out loud, losing your place,
starting again, then stopping because you're tempted to call
your friends and read them long sections of Jonathan Safran
Foer's assured, hilarious prose.
…
Not since Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange
has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized
with such brilliance and such brio. But if Burgess's hero
was an enraged, disaffected English youth bottom-feeding off
the detritus of Soviet culture, Foer's narrator is an actual
Russian (or more accurately, a Ukrainian) who could hardly
be more affable, more engaged or more enchanted by everything
American, from Michael Jackson and "the greatest of all
documentary movies, 'The Making of "Thriller," '
" to the career of the porn star John Holmes to the "many
good schools for accounting," one of which Alex dreams
of attending
…
Any attempt
to explain the complex narrative strategy of Everything
Is Illuminated makes it sound more complicated than it
is. Actually, it's not difficult to follow, since the structure
reveals itself slowly, in stages, and each one of these small
revelations is a source of surprise and pleasure. Indeed,
one of the book's attractions is its writer's unusually high
degree of faith in the reader's intelligence. […] Foer
has so much energy that he doesn't care if we get all the
jokes, whether we know that he is paraphrasing Heinrich von
Kleist or if we pause to follow the zany logic of a rabbi's
bawdy sermon comparing the glass partition separating his
male and female congregants to the division between heaven
and hell. In
fact, he's got his sights on higher -- much higher -- things
than mere laughs, on a whole series of themes so weighty that
any one of them would be enough to give considerable heft
to an ordinary novel. A partial list of the book's concerns
includes: the importance of myths and names, the frailty of
memory, the necessity of remembrance, the nature of love,
the dangers of secrecy, the legacy of the Holocaust, the value
of friendship, what it means to be loyal and good and to practice
what Jonathan has taught Alex to call "common decencies."
And I'm not even mentioning a whole host of subthemes, including
the confusions and collisions between American and post-Soviet
culture. Perhaps the most beautifully orchestrated comic set
piece in the book involves the Russians' appalled response
to "the hero's" vegetarianism -- and a dropped potato.
(The New York Times April 14, 2002, Sunday)
It is
an astonishing feat of writing: hilariously funny and deeply
serious, a gripping narrative supported by an unorthodox structure.
It acknowledges influences from Marquez to Singer to von Kleist;
it is, at the same time, very much itself. It is an extraordinary
book, in part because of the way it deals with a subject that
has, so far, almost entirely confounded writers of fiction.
(The Times June 5, 2002)
Everything
Is Illuminated is a complex, ambitious undertaking, especially
as its characters and events begin to run together in keeping
with the author's ultimate plan. Mr. Foer works hard on these
effects, and sometimes you will, too. But the payoff is extraordinary:
a fearless, acrobatic, ultimately haunting effort to combine
inspired mischief with a grasp of the unthinkable.
(The New York Times, April 22, 2002, Monday)
The
Author about the Book
"I
don't think there's a topic I address; and I certainly don't
think it's the Holocaust," he says. "One of my favourite
reviews began something like: 'Everything Is Illuminated pretends
to be the story of a young man who goes back to his grandfather's
village in search of his lost family history, but it's really
about all these other things, like love or grief or the role
of humour in life'. And that's how I feel about the book.
Obviously the Holocaust is important, obviously it changes
everything about the book and the way we have to look at it,
but I'm more interested not in how humour pertains to the
Holocaust but how humour pertains to life in general. And
how things are sad, in general."
…
After his second year at university, Foer undertook a trip
to Ukraine, just as "Jonathan Safran Foer" does
in the book; but fact and fiction, he says, are otherwise
utterly divergent. "There wasn't an Alex," he says.
"There wasn't a grandfather, there wasn't a dog, there
wasn't a woman I found who resembled the woman in the book
-but I did go, and I just found -nothing. At all. It wasn't
like a literary, interesting kind of nothing, an inspiring,
or a beautiful nothing, it was really like: nothing. It's
not like anything else I've ever experienced in my life. In
a certain sense the book wasn't an act of creation so much
as it was an act of replacement. I encountered a hole -and
it was like the hole that I found was in myself, and one that
I wanted to try to fill up."
(The Times, June 5, 2002)
