Everything is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

I read a portion of this book as a short story in The New Yorker a few years ago, but have only now gotten around to reading the entire book. It is definitely an inventive novel, and I enjoyed it a great deal, but I'm not sure that it's left any sort of lasting impression on me.

Foer's book tells a multitude of stories, through three different narrative strands. The most compelling (to me at least) is the story narrated by Alex, a Ukranian who sometimes works for his father's business, and who is charged with being a guide to the novelist (Jonathan), as they search Ukraine for a woman named Augustine, who had protected his grandfather from the Nazis during the second world war. With them is Alex's grandfather, who believes he is blind, but only from the grief of having lost his wife, and his dog, Sammy Davis Jr Jr. These sections of the novel are comical for the first half, and the story is narrated in Alex's broken and textbook-taught English. It is in this strand of the novel that Foer shows his ingenuity, and as the book progresses, we are able, among other things, to witness the steady improvement with which Alex speaks and writes English.

The second strand of the book is a one-sided correspondence between Alex and Jonathan as they exchange the other parts of the book with one another. Alex is smitten with Jonathan, and clearly attempts to please him, although that relationship changes subtly as the book progresses.

The final strand is Jonathan's novel, a fictionalized account of the history of his family and the shtetl of Trachimbrod, from the 1790s through to the war, although many eras are skipped and glossed over. This part of the book is, to me, the most problematic, as Foer eschews any trappings of historical accuracy, and instead shows Trachimbrod to be a modernist place, with warring congregations of Slouchers and Upright Jews, and where all things are recorded in modernist books of dreams and remembrances.

No parts of this book ever drag or feel over-long. As the book progresses, we begin to see how the two families, Alex's and Jonathan's are connected in history, and what the effects of digging in the past can be for people. As a debut novel, this really is an impressive piece of writing.