Everything is Illuminated [Hardcover]

An unusual and ambitious book, I found 'Everything is Illumniated' easier to read and more enjoyable than I first expected. The story is narrated by two young men living the 1990s, both struggling to understand the past of their grandparents during World War II and the effect that it has on their own present lives.

Jonathan is an American Jew who travels to the Ukraine in search of his family history. His sections of the story are a novel he is writing about his family in Ukraine from the 18th century up until 1942. These sections are strange and a little disjointed, and rather surreal - think Garcia Marquez or Rushdie. I found these sections harder to read and sometimes annoying as I felt they distracted attention from the 'real' story.

The other narrator is Alex, a Ukrainian youth who acts as Jonathan's translator and guide. Alex dreams of emigrating to America and escaping his unhappy family life. Alex's sections consist of letters he writes to Jonathan after the latter has returned home, and of the story of their trip together in search of Jonathan's past. These are written in a rather amusing broken English. A device that elsewhere I often find annoying and hard to read is here used to great comic and narrative effect. I found it readable and it added humour to what is ultimately a rather bleak story.

The humourous nature of Alex's earlier sections lull the reader into a false sense of security. The story unfolds to tell of the horrors committed in Ukraine by the Nazis, affecting both Jews and non-Jews. As the tale progresses the humour becomes lesser and the contrast between the amusing early chapters and the later ones heightens the emotional impact of the ending.

Overall, 'Everything is Illuminated' is refreshingly different and ambitious. Although it doesn't always come off perfectly, it is always good to read a book where the writer tries to innovate. I enjoyed the sections narrated by Alex and found these both moving and amusing. The only downside is the habit of writing dialogue continuously, rather than breaking up into new paragraphs for each speaker. This makes it at times harder to follow and I got confused between who was saying what. The sections narrated by Jonathan I found less enjoyable and I skimmed through them to get the next 'Alex' section. However, those who enjoy magical realism and surrealist writers may well enjoy these more.

On the whole, I would certainly recommend this to anyone who likes surrealist writing and anyone who likes to try original, innovative books. It is well written and although not always a particularly easy read, I would certainly try another by the same author.

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.

There is no doubt that this is a very clever book. It's clever in concept, clever in structure, clever in use of language and clever in composition. There are reams of congratulatory quotes all over the cover that announce it's cleverness. The question I'm left with having finished it is, is being clever enough?

The basic story follows Jonathan Safran Foer as he visits Ukraine to try and find the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather during the war and to research for a novel he is planning to write on his family history. He is helped in this search by a translator, Alex, driven about the country by Alex's "blind" grandfather and is repeatedly dry humped by their dog Sammy Davis Jr, Jr.

Immediately here lies one of the major problems with this book. Alex's grandfather isn't really blind, he just pretends to be, but continues to act as a driver. The dog is called Sammy Davis Jr, Jr as the original dog, Sammy Davis Jr, has died. As far as I can tell neither of these facts mean anything or serve any purpose other than being a little bit quirky and to me proved a distraction rather than an enhancement.

The story is told in a cleverly (that word again) fractured way. Alex narrates events from his viewpoint, in broken English. This strand is well crafted, but is essentially just one joke, which, since this book was released, has been firmly claimed by Borat. Then we see Alex's half of a letter conversation in which he discusses with Jonathan the accuracy of his narration and the finer points of his command of the English language. The third strand is the text of the novel which Jonathan is writing. This is written in a faux-high-literary style and concerns itself with the history of the town, Trachimbrod, from which his family originated.

So far, so clever. The problem is, that at the centre of this book is a really important and poignant moment in history, when the Nazi's massacred huge numbers of Ukranian Jews, and because of all the self-conscious cleverness which surrounds it, the impact of these events are totally lost. Rather than framing the horrors and drawing attention to the human loss, which I'm sure is what he intended to do, Safran Foer's linguistic flourishes instead only trivalise them.

Which is a real shame, because the scenes when the Nazi's roll into the Ukranian villages and we see the effects the resulting crimes have on the people there are superb.

Equally the way in which Alex matures throughout the novel, loses his awe of America and begins to address the problems in his own family rather than run from them, is beautifully handled.

Where this novel fails is a lack of restraint. The scenes from Jonathan's novel are lurid to the point of almost becoming magic-realism, and whilst there are some magnificent images you get the impression of a writer who is in love with his ideas, more than the constraints of form of the novel. There are so many wonderful thoughts in this book that I found myself wishing that he would show a little discipline and explore each one more fully rather than rushing headlong into the next exposition. The house full of boxes of items buried by the escaping Jews, each one fastidiously labelled and filed, is one example. The book of dreams another, the diving for the fake gold, the gold plated Dial statue another. In the end there are just too many of these ideas and they become a gimmick and muddy the story rather than build it.

There is a good tale in here, there are some fantastic uses of language, there are some memorable images, but it is all just a little bit too clever for it's own good and the end result unfortunately is a self-congratulatory muddle.