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.

За паспортом я Олександр Перцов. Але всі другани кличуть мене просто Алєкс, бо так тупо легше вимовити моє настояще ім’я. Мама мене називає Льоша-нє-нєрвіруй-мєня, бо я постоянно граю їй на нервах.

Такими словами – і я лише можу уявити, як це звучало в оригіналі – стартує свою першу книжку на той час 25-річний Джонатан Сафран Фоер. «Всьо ясно» стала для нього дебютом, справжнім «проривом» у світ літератури, який він із галасом повторив з книжкою «Страшенно голосно і неймовірно близько» - впевнена, ви знаєте як не роман, так фільм.
*
Мені дуже складно писати рецензію на «Всьо ясно» і не тому, що під кінець книжки розумієш – ніфіга не ясно, шановний Сафране, як можна було всьо аж так наплутати? – а тому, що теж маючи родину з єврейським корінням, в своїх пошуках я маю більше білих плям, ніж відповідей – хто, коли, чому і навіщо.

20-річний Джонатан – і це, власне, сам Фоер, наприкінці буремних українських 90-х приїжджає до Львова, де зустрічається з усіма «прєлєстями жизні», як-от подвійна такса для іноземця, який вєрняк має «валюту», висміювання вегетаріанства («і сосиски не їж? – ні. – шо з тобою не так?»), паскудна розбавлена кава і брудна підлога вокзалу, на якому зате розвішані голубі і жовті шматки паперу (в честь річниці Конституції). На таку ризиковану поїздку з двома одеськими «гідами» - нібито сліпим «дідом» і недоучкою з ін’язу Алєксом та шавкою на кличку Семмі Дейвіс Младший-Младший, Джонатан зважується заради пошуків таємничої Августини – жінки, яка врятувала його дідуся в часи Другої світової.

Чого не варто чекати?
Літературної мови і це зрозуміло з першого абзацу роману, а також з моїх речень – я не здатна втриматися і не вклинити цей одеський суржик, який Фоер видав англійською, а потім Ростислав Семків умудрився відтворити нашою, майже солов’їною.

Роману у класичному сенсі цього слова: Сафран – не Жауме Кабре, але й він любить пострибати роками – події 1999 року переплітаються з трагічним випадком 1791-го, потім ми бачимо Другу світову війну, яка немов завмерла у винищеному Трохимброді, а останній розділ – я не спойлю! – пропонує проекцію 1942-1791 років. Думайте!

Що ви отримаєте?
Звичайну людську драму: «Він непоганий чоловік. Він хароший чоловік, який народився в погане врємя». Її причини. Її наслідки.

Багато премудростей (звідки, звідки вони були у голові 25-річного Сафрона?), причому з добрячим ухилом до єврейської релігії, міфології і філософії загалом.

Чудовий гумор – уривок про Бога і плагіат, який Ним і був «породжений», я, мабуть, вставлю у свою дисертацію, просто на всяк випадок:)

Інтригу і навіть трохи містики, які триматимуть у постійному зацікавленні і особливо уважним (зізнаюсь, що деякі уривки перечитувала двічі) дадуть відповідь на все і навіть більше.

Євреї мають шість відчуттів.
Дотик, смак, зір, нюх, слух... пам‘ять. Тоді як не євреї-гої сприймають і перетворюють світ за допомогою тільки перших п’яти відчуттів, а пам’ять використовують лише як допоміжний засіб інтерпретації різних подій, для євреїв пам'ять є не менш відчутною, ніж укол шпильки, її срібний блиск чи смак крові, яка тече з пораненого нею пальця. Якщо єврея вколоти шпилькою, він одразу згадує про тисячі інших шпильок. Лише через зіставлення гостроти шпильки з гостротою інших відчуттів – як мама вколола тебе голкою, намагаючись пришпилити відірваний рукав, як дідові пальці звело кольками судоми, бо він змучився стирати піт із прадідового лоба, як Авраам пробував на пальці, чи гостре лезо ножа, щоб Ісаак не відчув болю, - тільки усвідомивши все це, єврей відчуває, що то справді болить.
Таким чином, коли єврей знаходить шпильку, він запитує себе: «Про що вона мені нагадує?»

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.

“I had performed recklessly well in my second year of English at university. This was a very majestic thing I did because my instructor was having shit between his brains.” Said Alex.
Two revelations shortly after starting the book: 1) I’m gonna have quite a joyride with Alex; 2) My English education in China was far from "first-rate". I had to look up “spleen...,
Corny as it seemed, Alex quickly won me over, and I found myself keep looking forward to the return to his narratives.
If without the, at best, run-of-the-mil magical realism half, I'd have given it a 4 stars.
After being enthralled by Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, I just wanted to check out one of her then husband's titles. Well, Nicole won the first round hands down.

The last book for the American Novel Since 1945!

Personally, I ended up loving this book, but I fully respect and understand those that hate it. I see you!

Everything is Illuminated is about an American named Jonathan Safran Foer who is visiting Ukraine. He has a goal to find Augustine, a woman pictured in a photograph that is associated with his grandfather.

To assist Jonathan in his journey are Alex (acting as translator) and Alex’s Grandfather (acting as driver).

First, readers hear from Alex, and he writes in broken English. His attempts at conquering the language are often humorous.

“My face gave a high-five to the front window.”

Then, readers have a section of the book from a different time period. The author essentially info dumps, introducing an overwhelming number of characters and events in a relatively short period of time.

This was where I was thinking, “Hmmmmm…..I’m not sure that I like this book…..”

But I persevered.

As the book unfolds, Alex and Jonathan talk about what to include in their story; perhaps not everything has happened in the way it was described. Some readers will naturally feel cheated.

I decided to sit with that feeling.

Everything Is Illuminated feels real because when the group finds someone (or did they?), the reader must question this person’s memory. When we read literature, the reader usually gets a detailed narrative with no missing holes, no missing segment of time. However, that isn’t life. I can’t even remember what I ate last week, let alone every detail from decades ago.

At one point, I was getting confused about Grandfather and Jonathan’s grandfather, trying to keep straight who is who. I suspect that might be intentional on the author’s part to show how history is interconnected.

Once pushing past some of the novel’s awkwardness, I found it deeply moving, and I enjoyed many delicious quotes.

Here are some:
“Fanny packs are not cool in America.”
“I truly feel that I was born to be an accountant.”
“I do not want to make you a petrified person, but there are many dangerous people who want to take things without asking from Americans, and also kidnap them. Good night.”
“He is not a bad person. He is a good person, alive in a bad time.”
“You are the only person who has understood even a whisper of me.”

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text – $11.89 from Amazon
Audiobook – $84.99 per year through Everand

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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This book is making me smile, even laugh. And why? Over and over again, JS Foer supplies fractured English from his Russian hero that is down right funny.

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.

So, my husband (who spends quite a bit of time painting) and I have lots of conversations about the irony involved in the fact that lots of what is considered "art" is really just shock value. We've giggled over the formaldehyded sharks exhibited in tanks as "art"; we've commented on sculptures made with real bones as not necessarily more valid or better than those that were created from clay or wood or some other inert matter.

I couldn't stop thinking about those conversations when reading this book. Yes, Foer is creative and yes, Alex's voice is quite good (funny and honest and sympathetically not-offensive because the cultural differences are so transparent in the writing). BUT the whole novel is just long and boring and not really very enlightening (sorry, I could not bring myself to write illuminating).

I get the Ulysses reference (thank you James Joyce for putting a play inside a novel and making it so absurd and dreamlike that we can call it "art"), especially as a sexual reference for Safran's conquests and Bloom's masturbatory wishes but I found it annoying and unnecessary and hard to read.

I was bothered by the anachronistic stuff. If Foer wants to start his story in 1791, he needs to actually write about 1791 and not give his tiny little obscure Russian village things like welcome mats and ovens and newspapers and novels. THEY DIDN'T HAVE THAT SHIT IN 1791! His characters in 1804 (Kolki and Brod) should also not have conversations about having a meaningful conversation (my understanding is that a Russian peasant in the 1800s would most likely NOT want this from his wife), or argue about TOILET PAPER ROLLS.

Ultimately the book was about love; not that love can save us or necessarily redeem us but that love will conquer us. No matter how we try to insulate or prevent or avoid, love will weasel its way into our lives and force us to make difficult decisions and face dire consequences. Early on Brod has to "satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love."

I still haven't figured out how Foer made a WWII love story so ridiculously boring, non-compelling, and tough to read; but I did not enjoy this at all.

Jonathan Safran Foer comes with a full bag of tricks, all of which he uses in an attempt to dazzle you out of seeing what this book actually is, which is corny. Safran Foer calls himself the product of a sampling culture, but there's more of an air of desperation about this book, which employs play dialogue, diary excerpts, run-on sentences, and like three pages straight of ellipses. The lead character is a Ukrainian named Alex who's gone thesaurus-happy, with an effect that starts off funny and quickly gets insufferable; the funny talk disguises what he's actually saying, which is corny.

It's told in several voices: Alex writing to Safran Foer, Alex writing a book, and Safran Foer's history of his family. The multiple voices allow him to comment on himself as he goes: they're each other's critics, peanut galleries, cheering sections and study groups. Safran Foer congratulates Alex on a particularly clever line about families; Alex analyzes the possible symbolism of Safran Foer's grandfather's erotic dead arm. Since actual Safran Foer wrote all of it, this amounts to self-congratulation.

The family history seems to be entirely made up. It goes heavy on the magical realism. (Special debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from whom Foer even borrows the butterflies.) Safran Foer did visit Ukraine when he was 19, but as far as I can tell no part of his family's story is real, even the parts that aren't obviously surreal. That makes you feel a little manipulated; Safran Foer seems to have appropriated the most heart-wrenching stories he knows about Nazis and Jews. It's easy to make an impact with a story about burning people.

Safran Foer belongs to a 21st century school of clown car authors - David Mitchell is another egregious example - who know a lot of tricks but not a lot of truths. Their stories are flashy but there's not a lot going on underneath. Without its razzle-dazzle, this is basically a maudlin and manipulative novel. Some of the tricks are fun! But it's like that old (racist) stereotype about Chinese food: fun to eat but you're hungry an hour later. This book is just okay.

The gut-tickling malaprop voice of Alex, bragging falsely (but without a trace of guile) in a broken idiolect that suggests computer translation gone awry, is worth the price of admission all by itself. Sadly, the rest of the book -- much of it strung out in unimaginative flashback episodes -- is a turgid, half-baked mess. Reading just Alex's bits and ignoring the rest would be a bit like picking out all the chocolate chips from a bag of trailmix...but that may be the best way to snack here.

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.

These actually are three stories in one book: that of the author Jonathan Safran Foer who visits Ukraine in search of traces of his ancestors, helped by a bumbling Ukrainian interpreter; that of the interpreter itself, Alexander, who accompanies Safran Foer and afterwards corresponds with him, and finally the story that Safran Foer writes about the history of his ancestors. The latter is rather nice, and Safran Foer shows that he has something to offer. But the antics of interpreter Alex for me were a real letdown: the process initially is funny, but after a few pages it became absolutely boring. (1.5 stars)