Voices: Come Full Circle With Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer writes a refreshingly rich and complex love letter to his ancestors and the people of the Ukraine in Everything Is Illuminated.

In short, Everything Is Illuminated is the story of a young Jewish American in search of his family’s history. Armed with a beguiling translator named Alexander Perchov, his grandfather and their dog Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Jonathan Safran Foer embarks on a journey through the Ukraine looking for Augustine, the woman in the photograph he carries who he believes helped save his grandfather during WWII. The novel seems to be broken up into three parts: the actual events of the family’s history from 1791-1942, Safran Foer’s reconstruction of these events in his unpublished novel, and the letters that he and Alexander share in 1997.

Everything is Illuminated introduces itself like a comfortable acquaintance, a foreigner you might meet by happenstance on a train who gladly shares the events of his/her life through slightly butchered English and deep, sad eyes. The most unmistakable element of this novel is its humor. Safran Foer encourages you to laugh at Alexander and his idolization of America and how he uses elevated words to express simple phrases. (I.e. “Amid Grandfather and I was a silence you could cut with a scimitar” or “I feel oblongated to again eat a slice of humble pie (my stomach is becoming chock-full)”. However, by book’s end you almost feel ashamed of laughing if for no other reason than your understanding of Alexander as a hopeful young man whose dreams have been deferred.

Safran Foer has an amazing command of language and literary techniques. His novel incorporates several of them, even becoming so bold as to create a few new ones by writing statements that seem to bleed into one another and comprise one streaming sentence, not to be confused with a run-on. I’ve highlighted several passages written with imaginative metaphors such as, “He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise” or “He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

The most difficult part about reading Everything Is Illuminated would have to be the complexity of the relationships and their overlapping. Staying cognizant of the chronology of events that happened in 1790-1942 and those happening in present day was no easy feat, either. Safran Foer has created a story within a story and a letter within a letter, revisiting the lives and trials of his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather. This, coupled with secret (and not-so secret affairs), makes the story’s plot even more involved and at times confusing, but nevertheless significant.

Through this effort to retrace his family’s history, Safran Foer illuminates the ills of human society as it relates to hideous hate crimes (particularly the Holocaust where Jews were pitted against Jews in the name of survival). What is also illuminated is the power of love to ripple through time and penetrate even the bleakest circumstances. Safran Foer does a lovely job of reflecting on forbidden love, unrequited love, and even the first fruits of love. The characters in this novel suffer through an overwhelming sense of yearning. They yearn for closeness, they yearn to forget or bury the tragedies of the past, and then there is yearning from Jonathan Safran Foer himself, as well as Alexander, for clarity and understanding all the secrets of their family’s past.

Everything is Illuminated is a mixed bag of all that is great about reading literature: history, love, tragedy, irony, exuberance, extreme sadness, imagination, humor, a distinctive style. If you are looking for familial story filled with humor, honesty, and an unconventional approach to a very conventional theme—trying to discover one’s family roots—I strongly recommend Everything is Illuminated.

--Nicole Crowder