Everything Is Illuminated

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Book Description

Exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving, Everything Is Illuminated is an astonishing tour de force. In the summer after his junior year of college, a writer — also named Jonathan Safran Foer — journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe. Armed with only a yellowing photograph, he sets out to find Augustine, the woman who might or might not be a link to the grandfather he never knew — the woman who, he has been told, saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Guided by the unforgettable Alex, his young Ukrainian translator, who writes in a sublimely butchered English, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, and an old man haunted by his memories of the war, Jonathan is led on a quixotic search across a devastated landscape and back into an unexpected past. Braided into this story is the novel Jonathan is writing, a magical fable of his grandfather's village in Ukraine, a tapestry of startling symmetries that unite generations across time. In a counterpoint of voices blending high comedy and deep tragedy, the search moves back in time, the fantastical history moves forward, and they meet in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.

Passionate, wildly inventive, and marked by an indelible humanity, Everything Is Illuminated mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching: for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future.

Amazon.com

The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a na?ve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

If all this sounds a little daunting, don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer who combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, and loss.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

What would it sound like if a foreigner wrote a novel in broken English? Foer answers this question to marvelous effect in his inspired though uneven first novel. Much of the book is narrated by Ukrainian student Alex Perchov, whose hilarious and, in their own way, pitch-perfect malapropisms flourish under the influence of a thesaurus. Alex works for his family's travel agency, which caters to Jews who want to explore their ancestral shtetls. Jonathan Safran Foer, the novel's other hero, is such a Jew an American college student looking for the Ukrainian woman who hid his grandfather from the Nazis. He, Alex, Alex's depressive grandfather and his grandfather's "seeing-eye bitch" set out to find the elusive woman. Alex's descriptions of this "very rigid search" and his accompanying letters to Jonathan are interspersed with Jonathan's own mythical history of his grandfather's shtetl. Jonathan's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod is the central figure in this history, which focuses mostly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Though there are some moments of demented genius here, on the whole the historical sections are less assured. There's a whiff of kitsch in Foer's jolly cast of pompous rabbis, cuckolded usurers and sharp-tongued widows, and the tone wavers between cozy ethnic humor, heady pontification and sentimental magic-realist whimsy. Nonetheless, Foer deftly handles the intricate story-within-a-story plot, and the layers of suspense build as the shtetl hurtles toward the devastation of the 20th century while Alex and Jonathan and Grandfather close in on the object of their search. An impressive, original debut. (Apr. 16)Forecast: Eagerly awaited since an excerpt was featured in the New Yorker's 2001 "Debut Fiction" issue, Everything Is Illuminated comes reasonably close to living up to the hype. Rights have so far been sold in 12 countries, the novel is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and a main selection of Traditions Book Club, and Foer will embark on an author tour expect lively sales.

From Booklist

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

From Library Journal

This highly imaginative debut novel features a protagonist with the same name as the author. The fictional Jonathan Safran Foer, also a writer, travels to Eastern Europe after his junior year in college. His mission, as he ventures through the farmlands, is to find Augustine, who may have saved the grandfather he never knew from the Nazis. Accompanying Jonathan on his quixotic quest is Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks hilariously fractured English. The fabled history of his grandfather's shtetl, or village, is juxtaposed with events in the present using comedy interspersed with tragedy. Generations become united across time in this fanciful tale, as Foer, the author, gives the reader a contemporary version of 19th-century Jewish drama one that blends laughter and tears. Recommended for all libraries. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6