Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin Co./$24
The cover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, is striking. One side of the dust jacket is black with the novel’s title in white letters. The other side is exactly the opposite (white background, black print) and upside down. Foer has effectively made a book that has no front and no back. Neither side of the book is more important than the other.
This mindset is how one should approach Everything is Illuminated.
Written with two plotlines running side by side, this novel has the same temporally ambiguous quality of an interrupted daydream.
One storyline is Foer’s vision of his family’s history from 1791 (when his great-great-great-great-great grandmother was found in the Jewish shtetl of Trachimbrod under unusual circumstances) until 1941 (when his grandfather was helped by a mysterious stranger named “Augustine” to escape from Ukraine before the Nazis took over). This story is written like a fairy tale, with magic and mystery, and also as a fading memory, as he skips through time to collect imagery and events.
The other plotline is of Foer’s journey through Ukraine to find Augustine. The only proof he has that she exists is a picture of her. He is accompanied by Alexander (Foer’s Ukranian translator who acts as the narrator of this section), Alexander’s grandfather (Foer’s driver, who is himself haunted by the events of his past), and Sammy Davis Junior Junior (so named because Sammy Davis Jr. was Alexander’s Grandfather’s most “beloved singer”).
Alexander’s English is horribly and hilariously flawed and his writing is filled with malapropisms and faulty use of language that are at the same time endearing and confounding. At times, you have to stop reading to figure out what Alexander is saying. At other times you have to stop to catch your breath from laughing.
But even Alexander’s humor cannot brighten a story that is eventually as sad as Everything is Illuminated. The two plots converge and climax, the result of which is bleak and heartbreaking. Ghosts of the past are unearthed and what ensues is unwavering tragedy.
Foer possesses the qualities of great Jewish writers before him. He has J.D. Salinger’s wit and Elie Weisel’s realism. He tiptoes the line (one that is often razor thin) between poetry and vulgarity, tenderness and violence, humor and tragedy. His writing is like the cover of his book: black and white.
—Tom Jungerberg
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2002.
