Everything is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer
(Penguin) $22.95 PB

This is a new, small-format edition of a book that came out last year. The new edition is $7 cheaper than the first, though there's a catch: as a second edition, it now comes cushioned in dozens of review quotes that really make it more difficult to just sit down and read the book. I mention this phenomenon only because the quotes seem to be multiplying at the moment, without any sense of restraint, or respect for the reader's right to form their own opinion. This particular volume comes clothed in no less than 36 (!) quotes on back cover, inside covers front and back, plus the first three pages. Some are repeated more than once in different places, though it's hard to keep track because they're all so similar: 'strartling originality', 'intensely inventive', 'boldly imaginative', 'startling originality' (ironically, again). So much hype can be like irritating static when you sit down to read a novel - when there are 36 of them it becomes like a deafening roar, insistently telling you what to think.

Anyway, the book itself (if you can find it between all the review quotes) is a startlingly original and intensely inventive slightly convoluted and very self-reflexive laminate of different times, places and voices. There are three basic strands: the first level of narrative is a (fictional) history of a Jewish-Ukrainian village named Trachimbrod, 1791-1943, which purportedly includes the tale of Foer's own ancestry. Level 2 is a narrative in the voice of Foer's Ukrainian interpreter Alex, describing their adventures uncovering the history of Trachimbrod. Level 3 is comprised of letters from Alex to Foer, commenting on how the two other strands are being written, and in particular on how they are being distorted. It is the letters that give the novel its self-reflexive aspect, beginning in the early installments with comments on how the names are badly invented or the Jewish humour incomprehensible, while later letters go so far as to draw our attention to certain events or phrases, and provide possible interpretations.

The ficto-historical story of Trachimbrod is told with elaborate and absurd humour, each person, event or element being given unlikely tangents of information that deliberately have nothing to do with anything, dangling like tassels from the sleeves of the story. Perhaps it is because of these that the narrative seems to take a while to get going, opening with all sorts of comic flourishes, before rushing headlong into a tragic tale that will lead eventually to the Holocaust.

The letters from 'Alex' to Foer cultivate a totally different sort of comedy, based on the interpreter's struggle with his second language, English. We are given to understand that Alex makes constant use of a thesaurus to help colour his writing, so that in place of typical English phrases, there are unconventional substitutions of one word for another, e.g. 'This is where I loitered for the hero for more than four hours. His train was dilatory, so it was five hours. I was spleened to have to loiter there with nothing to do.' Though Alex's voice is not remotely convincing as a representation of English-as-a-second-language, it is an ingenious way of creating new combinations of words, and using them with relish.

In Alex's descriptions of his short Ukrainian adventure with Foer, we go further into the dialogue between different languages, but also between different historical experiences, economic conditions, and social conventions. Drawing on these various dimensions of difference, Foer gets a lot into a short book. The three strands of narrative draw attention to each others' failures and omissions, as do the characters, thanks to the gaps in their ages and nationalities. No-one knows everthing, everyone is naïve. All the stories and memories get changed in the telling. To be honest I found it all a bit hard to follow.

I was impressed, nonetheless, by Everything is Illuminated - but maybe not as impressed as the review quotes wanted me to be.

Review by John Mansfield