I have mixed feelings about this one; I loved the magic realism and the story about the history of the shtetl, the characters in it and the history up to the second world war. The modern story did not grab me. I found the use of language in the present briefly funny and then irritating (flaccid to utter for easy to say, rigid journey for hard journey). Hard work with a thesaurus I would think, but half the novel is like this. I'm not sure whether the Alex's were a nod to A Clockwork Orange, which also mangled the language at times. To me all this was a bit too smart and not engaging.
However, despite the strong comic element, I found the tragedy in it more convincing and the story of Yankel and Brod was excellent

Overhyped, yess. But the embedded bits of brilliance are worthwhile. The play of language is what I'm most interested in here, more than the meditations on loss, holocaust, and history's shadow of brutality, personal (micro) history intersecting with, building, and being torn apart by, macro history. Those elements are there, yes.
But Alex's play of language, it goes on even in the midst of disaster. Yeah, it's a metaphor for the difficulty of all cultural, and thus personal, understanding and communication. Sometimes it's too damned clever. Sometimes you wake up your neighbors laughing.

And to give context--I was given this book by a woman I fell for during a particularly chaotic phase of both of our lives. She had had some considerable trouble in this culture, and was returning to the place she'd come from; thus the book. And she shares Foer's ability to look at something with total openness, to make suffering and insight and quotidian things alike fucking light up with the fire of understanding. And what we never accomplished in, physical communication, we did in letters, in messages: despite the difficulties of culture and language, it happened in words. As it does in Foer's novel.

So what I love about this book has only something to do with the book, and more with the process of communication itself, with language, and how I fell in love with it once again, with eyes open, knowing the pain and the risk.

Alternates between being absolutely hilarious and completely heartbreaking. The hilariousity comes courtesy of narrator Alex, who is a Ukranian tour guide hired to guide a young man (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) to a village where his grandfather was saved from the Nazis by a woman named Augustine. Along for the ride is Alex's grandfather (he's the driver, but insists that he's blind and "I'm supposed to be retarded!") and his seeing eye dog, referred to by Alex as the "seeing-eye bitch." Alex's English makes the book worth reading. With Alex, things aren't good, they're "premium." People don't chew, they "masticate." And he often "goes to famous nightclubs and dispenses currency." His English mysteriously improves whenever the plot needs to be serious, but I didn't have a problem with this.
The other parts of the story focus on the history of the town where Jonathan Safran Foer's grandfather will eventually be saved, and here the writing style reminded me a lot of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some parts of it were funny, but mostly, it was very, very depressing.
All in all, a wonderful book, and Foer gets maximum points for writing as two completely different narrators, and doing both very well.

2.5
Nie potrafiłam się wciągnąć w tą historię. Początek był dla mnie ciężki do przejścia, końcówka ciekawsza ale nie wiem do końca co o tej książce sądzę. Nie rozumiem zachwytów.

Funny In a Tragic Way

What would the English of a bright Ukrainian who had learnt it largely from local pop culture and a thesaurus sound like? Hilarious actually. Especially in the telling of a tale which has both been told so many times, and can never be told adequately: the Holocaust.

There are two protagonists, the author, a young Jewish man off to find his roots in a now famous but obliterated shtetl near the Polish/Ukrainian border; and a young, ambitious lad from a disfunctional family in Odessa who acts as guide and subsequent interlocutor. The author writes history (of a post-modernist sort); the lad writes of the trip and comments on the author's text.

It is these latter comments that are most compelling because they reveal both the essential irrelevance of the destruction of European Jewry to the lives of those who have inherited the unexpurgated guilt of the massacres, and the way in which that guilt remains an essential but unspoken feature of life. Without the comedic language to make this contradictory point, the book would likely fall flat. With that language, and it's gradual 'normalisation' during the course of the tale, the book becomes a story of revelation.

Signor Jonathan Safran, mi facci il piacere…


Qualsiasi domanda mi faccia sul perché questo romanzo sia stato scritto e scritto a questo modo mi costringe a darmi risposte che fanno a pugni con la teoria della libertà di un artista e a maggior ragione di uno scrittore, la cui libera espressione ha pochissimi limiti materiali (una tastiera o un penna ) che affliggono le altre arti: spaziare nel tempo e nello spazio è una bazzecola, poi.
Ma credo che ci siano dei limiti invalicabili a cui ci si può approcciare con intelligenza e soprattutto pudore.

Sulla quarta di copertina , a parziale "illuminazione", c’è scritto a caratteri bianchi, corpo 18 su carta ocra gialla ” E se dobbiamo batterci per un futuro migliore, non dobbiamo conoscere il nostro passato e riconciliarci con esso?”
Che cavolo ( mi astengo dal turpiloquio)di senso ha questa frase trattandosi di un argomento con cui non puoi assolutamente riconciliarti? Mica si parla di un’analisi da un consulente di matrimoni andati a catafascio. Parla dei delatori goyim ucraini ( ma li possiamo ritrovare in tutta Europa dei tempi e qualcuno comincia a fare a capolino oggi: cambiato bersaglio – neri, muslmani e clandestini- ma stessa pulsione) al tempo dell’avanzata nazista, di quelli che non solo per salvare la vita denunciavano l’amico ebreo con cui avevano condiviso tutto.

Alex senior è un nonno simpatico oltre a essere copratogonista della inconsistente narrazione.
Così ce lo fa lo scrittore ebreo americano in cerca del suo di nonno, sfuggito in tempo dalla tenaglia nazista e goyim da un villaggio ucraino, di cui si sono pure perse le tracce nelle mappe.
Ce lo fa simpatico tanto da volerci commuovere con la sua tardiva espiazione per “epistola” allo stesso scrittore.
E il tutto è un mero esercizio di scrittura che meritava argomenti di ben altra leggerezza dell’essere ( tanto per citare il da lui citato, nel titolo, Kundera, altro sopravvalutato ).
Passi il divertente carteggio di Alex junior, nipote del senior, con lo stesso scrittore: è un “picciutteddu” all’oscuro di tutto quel popò di vergogna, così che l’odissea alla ricerca del villaggio è spassosa ma tirata per le lunghe è stucchevole.
Come stufa, a breve raggio, tutta la rievocazione storico lirica dell’albero genealogico da cui discenderebbe Safran l’americano.
Un libro inutile. Neanche blasfemo perché non ha la grandezza malefica della blasfemia.

P.S. A tratti mi ha ricordato la filosofia sottesa a quello stupidissimo e mediocrissimo film di Benigni: La vita è bella.
“Mi faccino il piacere”.

30/12/2010 Black forest cake and cheap champers has got the better of me - review to follow shortly..
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So far monumentally profound in a weird kind of serendipitous epiphaneia - well to me anyway: it's like trying to describe the dawning of the light upon the darkness of my own mongrel family tree and perhaps that is what is so illuminating about it.
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Found we have this in the TBR box & forgot to list it on GR, must have bought it on one of the last 2nd hand buying sprees (all you can fit in a bag for $10).

Planning on doing a similar quest at some point like J. Safran Foer does in this book, but need more information before embarking. Veiled clues & family stories hint that my maternal Gr.Gr. Grandfather & possibly his grandson's wife's family came from somewhere in those ever shifting borderlands around what was once known as Volhynia.

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23 01/2011
Finally got around to watching the dvd tonight. Compared to the book Alex is the main character in the film, followed by the grandfather, then Jonathan. The movie has been lambasted elsewhere for leaving out this and that, but I think you have to appreciate the directors' vision and that it's difficult to translate a book totally. What everyone takes from a book is individual, ditto it's only human to transpose that into film differently. The film did clear up some confusion for me, ie. who Alex's grandfather was in relation to the woman in the sunflower field and in relation to Jonathan's grandfather - the book kind of fuddled me there. It's shot in the Ukraine and the countryside is beautiful......
Not sure if it's worth mentioning but my daughter wondered why Jonathan was collecting dirt from beside the river.......this is a thing Jewish people do when visiting Holocaust sites, so they can take home some piece of their loved ones - the book doesn't mention Jonathan being a collector...(where he collects dirt, photographs, grasshoppers and things of family significance)......but the film adds this characteristic. It works for me. I liked it. There was a silence not visible in the book - and that made it more poignant - but the book fills the silence with the history of the river ~ which is also poignant in another way. For those who like history. Once again as in the book the dinner sequence where the potato falls on the floor has me in stitches. This is a Ukrainian custom. You have to share that which falls on the floor. It also reminds me of the emails my daughter sent me when she was in the Ukraine, "send food, all you can get here is potatoes and meat".

Cleverly constructed adventure in cultural misunderstandings, told with playful wit, quirky humor, and facetious self-awareness easy to fall for.

Jonathan Safran Foer's inventive usage of language is wholly unique and delightful; the keen reconstructions of English syntax, idioms and common linguistic conventions create uproariously hilarious vitality, and stealthily profound lyricism to the book's narration; all absolute pleasure to read.

An ingeniously comedic, sympathetic, and touching tale of human connection. Had one "manufacturing tears of joy and immersing into the genius of sadness until the very posterior".


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More thoughts? In the reading updates below.

I have previously read and liked a book by this author, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. So, I decided to try another. It did not go well.

There are two stories here. One involves the main character, Jonathan Safran Foer (yes, the same as the author), in the 1990s, searching for information about his family’s history, accompanied by Alex (a Ukrainian translator), Alex’s grandfather, and his grandfather’s dog. Jonathan wants to visit the village where his grandfather lived and hopes to find the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during WWII. The second story is being written by Jonathan about his ancestors. He is creating it around a box of mementos given to him by a woman of the village. It jumps around in time from 1791 to 1942.

I strongly disliked this book. The plot is unfocused and disjointed. It feels unfinished and actually ends in the middle of a sentence. The title must be ironic. I assume the illumination is of the people who pointed out Jews to the Nazis during WWII, but usually illumination is positive, so it is a bit confusing. A large portion is narrated by Alex, the Ukrainian translator, whose English is not fluent. I think this device is supposed to be humorous, but I found it annoying. Alex employs the wrong words in expressing himself and his grammar is atrocious.

I was tempted not to finish, but it is short. If you like direct storytelling, avoid this book. On a positive note, it is an uncommon take on WWII fiction. I believe it will appeal to those that enjoy experimental fiction.

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum".
One of the beautiful quote from the book.

But the book, What the .........................
I really don't know what to say actually about this book. As written on the book cover (work of a genius) ok i admit it is.
But Did I love this book or i hate it at maximum? Gone through different feelings of love, anger, hate, happiness, pain, fun but I just got headache every time I read it and that's the reason for ending it too late and reading other books between this time period. Many times I feel sick while reading and with the start of another chapter I feel energetic and alive. That's how the whole book is.......
A unique combination of beautiful and shitty things all going one after another alongwith complicated events of the war. Moreover the letters of Alex for Jonathan written in the book is another mind using tactic. Few chapters and phrases are so excellent and deep that you are forced to immersed in the magic of the writer while other are so digusting that you just want to hit your head with something.
Why Jonathan
whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
why
that's what I was saying while reading those filthy chapters. I mean how could one think of a story like this. A grandfather having 68 affairs with his dead arm and still don't know what's love. Whats the purpose of writing that part??? Seriously that's intolerable.....
The only part I like, Sasha with his grandfather alongwith the hero (Jonathan) in the search of Augustine. And I hate the part of Brod, Kokler & yankel.

Not every book is for everyone and this one is definitely not for me......
Apart from the fact I like it or not but that's seriously not an easy book to write.
2 stars for the parts I like and for that intricate work of a genius but still I dislike most of the parts..

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.

I disliked the character named "Jonathan Safran Foer" and I cannot stand when authors make themselves the heroes of fiction. You made up the story, you can't make up a name for the character? The ESL narrator Alex is the reason I like the book at all. He probably would have been even better if I hadn't seen Borat. He writes like Borat speaks, especially in the beginning of the book. But he is generous and grows emotionally, whereas JSF is snide and self-involved. It seems to me that many contemporary authors, mostly of the young man with interesting glasses variety, are far too pleased with themselves, and it affects their work negatively. If you are the most interesting thing about the book you wrote, that doesn't say much for your imagination, does it? Can't we all imagine characters more interesting than ourselves? Perhaps these authors were praised too much as children and didn't have to pretend they were someone else.