Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
I was given this book by a friend in Denmark. She’s a member of Pet Talk, and an avid reader, though English is not her native language. I was to read them, and pass them along to another Pet Talker, as she was curious as to what I would think of the two books.
I had heard of this book, and remember it getting some positive buzz, and so looked forward to reading it. Boy, was the “buzz” wrong. I did not find the book at all amusing, instead I found it quite annoying. The premise is that it is composed of letters between a young man in Eastern Europe, and the American author who hired his grandfather to guide him, searching for the small town his ancestors fled from, those who survived the Nazis and WWII. It is annoying because the maybe Ukranian kid does not write English as well as he thinks he does, so in the beginning, his writing is full of misused words, and fractured expressions. The one example that springs immediately to mind is that he uses spleen as a verb, in place of annoy or anger. This ONLY makes sense if you are familiar with the expression “he was venting his spleen,” and that is just not commonly used. I immediately understood why my Danish friend had such trouble – I had a hard time understanding the first few chapters, and I have heard English spoken my whole life.
So once you get over this hurdle, the story is long, somewhat tedious, and at its heart, a very sad, depressing, Holocaust story. Interwoven with that tale is a strange sort of folktale regarding a girl who became, eventually, the American’s ancestor. And her story is sad, twisted, and very dark as well. It seems very Old World in tone, and is very Jewish in flavor, that part didn’t bother me. And at least it is told in a fairly straightforward manner.
I did persevere and finish the book, it got easier to read as it went along, but I would not reccomend it. And after I finished it, I read the comments on the back which called it “humorous” and “delightful,” which I just did NOT agree with. Listen, I do not demand that everything be sweetness and light by any means. But when the single, somewhat redeeming act in a book is a suicide, sorry, I don’t count it as funny. I can see how it was TRYING to be funny, but that doesn’t make it funny for real.
I will pass it along, but at least the next person is forewarned to have low expectations!