Mike's Reviews > Everything is Illuminated

I watched the movie of this first and loved it. It was basically a movie about cultural misunderstanding and how people can be cruel without really knowing it. It is a story about what happens when you put an American and someone born out of the Soviet era in the same room and try to make them explain to one another why the other one thinks the way they do. In a word: hilarious.

After reading the book, I still like the movie, but it seems obvious to me that the filmmakers missed the point entirely. The book, while still a hilarious exploration of an American immersed in post-Soviet culture, is so much deeper and weirder.

The story is (sort of) about the author, Jonathan Safran Foer. He is an aspiring writer in his early 20s who travels to Ukraine to try to find the small Jewish village of Trachimbrod where his grandfather grew up and to find the woman who helped him escape the Nazis during the war. He speaks no Ukrainian or Russian, and his only maps of the area are 60 years old, so he enlists the help of Alexander, an Odessa native of about the same age, his blind grandfather, who acts as their driver (if you have read any modern Russian literature you will understand not to question this kind of thing) and their deranged seeing-eye bitch Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

Half of the story (the half on which the movie is based) is ostensibly written by Alex. He write in English with an accent, in that (I assume) it was written, then rewritten by looking up every third word in the thesaurus and replacing it with the least appropriate synonym. This section is a humorous, touching, narrative touching on the nature of friendship, grief and regret, among other things. It is accessible and easy to understand.

The other half (which is entirely ignored by the movie) is written by Jonathan, and covers the history of the village from the day it got its name in 1791 until its destruction by the Nazis in 1941, following the exploits of his ancestors. All of these sections have a very surreal quality. They jump around in time, different eras have glimpses into the past and future. Everything that happens is completely bizarre and makes no sense. It explores much more difficult topics, such as the nature of life, love, and art, and is in general much more philosophical and harder to get your head around.

These sections are split by letters from Alexander to Jonathan commenting on Jonathan's sections and introducing his own next section.

The weird thing about this book is that, at least for me, it gets frustrating to read the author's crazy attempts at philosophy. He wanders around so much, it seems like he is trying to write a little mini-story for every emotion he's every experienced in his entire life. Normally, I would discard a book like this and say, "Well, it's a young author's overeager first attempt, and he tried to cover too much." However, there are so many parts in Alex's letters and narrative where these things are addressed (once Jonathan says something like, "I want to be a writer, but I'm not good yet.") and Alex asks a lot of questions like Why do you write like this? and Why did you have the characters do that? The incoherence of it all becomes a part of the greater logic of the novel, which in turn provides an answer to the question, "Why did Jewish people stay in Poland and Ukraine when they knew the Nazis were coming?" This books answer, I imagine, would be, "Because nothing anyone did in the village's 150 year history made sense, why should they have done the sensible thing in 1941?"

The book is hilarious, moving and disturbing among other things. I can't help but be annoyed by its weird narrative and pointless philosophical musings, but given that it bathes itself in its own strangeness, it raises itself up and becomes a pretty awesome book.