BOOK REVIEW: Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Let this be a lesson to me. I really thought I knew what to expect when I picked up Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). After all, when it came out five years ago, the media went wild for it. All the famous book reviews and glossy magazines gushed over this ambitious, postmodern first novel and its young author, who wrote it as his college thesis. You couldn’t avoid talk of it. I did quite a good bit of eye rolling over the book, lying and saying I’d read it, or pretending like I’d read it, because I felt I knew exactly what it would be like. I pictured a loopier A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with more of an international flavor and maybe some George Saunders-ish elements thrown in.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong about everything. I misread the reviews, not to mention the advertising; I’ve gone back and read those glowing reviews, and they’re not at all the way I remembered them. I must have been bowled over and jealous by how young Foer was. But after finally reading his beautiful book, I don’t feel at all jealous; I’m just happy that we have this endlessly creative, energetic, urgent, unique, generous writer.

The book has two, alternating narratives. The first narrative we encounter is in the form of letters written to a character named Jonathan Safran Foer from Alexander Perchov, a young Ukranian who will guide the character Jonathan on his trip to Ukraine to explore the life of his grandfather, a Jew who escaped the Holocaust by moving to America. Alex is, as he says, “fluid” in English, which pretty much sums it up – the contortions and meanderings through which his sentences travel are hilarious. The second narrative is the novel that Jonathan is writing, a magical realist story of the shtetl of Trachimbrod and the residents of its Jewish Quarter (as opposed to those residents of the “Human Three-Quarters”). Alex’s language is so entertaining that at first I rushed through Jonathan’s sections, but soon I found myself entranced by all of it. There’s intricate interplay between Jonathan’s writing and Alex’s; both are squeezing everything they can out of words that can’t quite cover the depth of the stories they have to tell.

About halfway through the book, when Jonathan, Alex, and Alex’s Grandfather travel to the village that used to be Trachibrod, the Holocaust, which has been dancing in the background of the book, comes into the forefront. Forcing the terrible hidden history of Trachimbrod out of its only remaining resident, Alex says, “I periled everything.” And here the book kicks into high gear, taking on an excitingly huge moral and emotional weight as Jonathan, Alex, and, especially, Grandfather come to a place where nothing stands between them and that recent history that is impossible to imagine yet impossible not to. Standing face to face with it, there is no way not to learn that everyone is implicated in the Holocaust’s tragedies, simply by continuing to live after it. This book makes the Holocaust more real than does anything I’ve ever read about the Holocaust, and yet his prose and its energy and compassion are deeply life affirming.

By the book’s mountingly awful final moments, the two narratives – and the narrators – are perfectly in sync, in such a way that almost ironically undercuts the chaos and senselessness of the scenes those narratives are depicting. The ending is huge, crushing, beautiful.

I’m so glad that my preconceptions didn’t stop me from reading this book. It has passages of great beauty, many moments of hilarity, and, most of all, a real, beating heart at its center. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and totally deserving of that wall of praise it got five years ago.

Lucy B., Books Correspondent

Lucy’s column, published every other Tuesday to Gather Essentials: Books, revisits recent works of literary fiction.

Lucy is a copy editor at a news service in Northern Virginia.

You can find Lucy’s book reviews at www.gather.com/lucysreviews