EveryKeith is Illuminated

Read from Friday, February 4th to Sunday, February 6th.

Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Again, I return to Eastern Europe, and again I return (happily I may add) to JSF.  This book has been on my shelf for awhile, and though I saw the movie a couple of years ago, I flew through this work of art.  Many critics do not like his writing style, saying it is too modern, using too many devices like time shifts, writing to look like artwork, photos, dialects and unreal elements.  This is exactly why I love this writing, and this is what I would aspire to write like.

This semi-autobiographical novel follows two story arcs, told by two narrators.  In the present day, JSF travels to Ukraine and hopes to find a woman named Augustine who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis.  Armed with only a photograph and the name of the town, Trachimbrod, he hires a tour company that consists of Alex (the narrator of this story), whose English makes him a translator, and Alex's grandfather, who says he is blind but is the driver, and also his seeing eye bitch, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.  This motley crew set off into the countryside to find this lost town where his grandfather was from.  This is the most humorous part of the story.  Alex seems like he learned his English from a dictionary and thesaurus without learning how the words are used properly.  The dog is hilarious,  as is JSF's vegetarianism.  Alex is writing his version of their search for Jonathan's novel, and he explains things in letters that accompany each chapter (very meta).

At the same this story is being told, Jonathan is also writing the history of his family and the town, specifically his (very) great grandmother, Brod, who survived a river accident in 1791, and who the town is named after.  Unable to love anyone, and unable to comprehend what love is, Brod sets a precedent for her family to follow for many generations.  She marries a man who rescued her from a rapist at age 13, and was then injured in a saw mill accident.  He survived for many years after, and after his death he was turned into a statue that the town used for luck.  There are many elements of magical realism that exist in these sections of the story, and I think they work very well.   

Meanwhile, the present-day search is getting closer to the truth as they find an old woman who says she is all that remains of Trachimbrod.  She has many collections of papers, artifacts and mementos from the town, and she shows them where it used to exist, but it is now just an empty field.  She is the last one left alive there, but she is not the lucky one.  The lucky ones are the dead ones that are not forced to remember.  But she is not Augustine, she is Lista, who knew his grandfather.  She then tells a harrowing tale of how the Nazis lined every Jew up, and forced them to spit on the Torah.  Her father refused to spit, so the Nazis shot her in her pregnant stomach, and the baby absorbed the blow so she could survive.

Both stories converge on Safran, JSF's grandfather, in the years before the war.  His story is told in the magical back-story by JSF.  He was a womanizer, sleeping with many widows and lonely women until he was forced to marry the rich girl in town, nine months before the Nazi invasion.  She becomes pregnant of course, and when the Nazis bomb the town, most of the town drowns in the river, but Safran is able to float away to safety. 

Back in the present, Alex's grandfather becomes uneasy when the woman gives them a photo of him as a young man.  His grandfather reveals another terrible story about how in a neighboring town, the Nazis forced everyone to reveal a Jew.  He was a Gentile, but his best friend Herschel was Jewish, and he had to point him out or else risk his family's life.  This experience haunted him for the rest of his days, and the grandfather ends up killing himself a few months after Jonathan returns to the U.S.  However he is more at peace after revealing his secret, and giving his grandson the strength and courage necessary to care for the family on his own, after he kicks out his deadbeat alcoholic dad. 

One fault of the story is that it can be confusing to follow all the characters and what their interrelationships are.  There are many switches in time, and new connections are revealed often.  Lista's character is confusing to the reader, and I had to reread some passages, although she was probably meant to be confusing since the characters didn't know what was happening either.  The dialogue requires careful reading.  It is quick, and put all in one paragraph with no speaker identity, and some of it is supposed to be Ukrainian and some in English.  Some of the connections between JSF and the Ukrainian characters seemed like too much of a coincidence as well, but I guess it is supposed to be a fictional story. 

Most of all, this is a work of art.  At times, there are scenes of plays, lists of recurring dreams, and an encyclopedia of every minute fact of the town of Trachimbrod, very similar to his other book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  At times very sexual, and at times extremely hilarious, these light-hearted moments disappear toward the end, as the graphic examples of human nature are revealed.  Memory is a sixth sense that all the characters have to live with in the book.  There is also the theme of who is good and who is bad, and what makes it that way, and can a good person do bad things?

It is sad, like all the characters in the novel.  I am eager to rewatch the movie to see any differences, and I am also still eagerly awaiting Tree of Codes, which still has yet to ship.  Four and a half out of five stars.