Everything is Illuminated

With a title as striking, vibrant and almost audacious as Everything is Illuminated, the novel itself has something of a hard act to follow, but what does follow is nothing short of a masterpiece.

The novel introduces us to a young Jewish man named Jonathan, and his Ukrainian translator Alex whom he hired along with an unexpected and comical entourage to search for a woman who may hold the key to his family history.  The gulf between Jonathan and Alex's understanding of the English language results in the sometimes erroneous, often strangely enlightening text that is Alex's letters.  These letters, juxtaposed to the other voices and narratives that resonate within the novel form a platform to explore the relationship between truth and language, and indeed history, which Jonathan Safran Foer encompasses with Nietzschean flair.  As Alex and Jonathan explore their pasts through myths, family names, and the names of the rivers, statues, and buildings of the local area; the novel carves a sense of the space that people, events and things occupy, in a physical, spiritual, temporal and even a linguistic sense.  To exist, the novel suggests, is not just to be, but to create an anti-matter, a void or negative against which the existent is delineated.  And against this stencil landscape, the novel cavorts with space even more than form: loving love more than the loved one, admiring scaffolding more than the building it will become, feeling a despair at a lovers absence which is greater than the love for the absentee.

And it is this technique, along with many other ingenious and inspired perspectives that has the power to reveal truths and uncover more questions regarding history, language, and, pertinently, the purpose of fiction itself.

With its beauty of prose, its skill at containing both harrowing events and comic escapades, and its overwhelming originality in spite of its Joycean heritage, this novel will leave an enduring impression.

‘An astonishing feat of writing: hilariously funny and deeply serious, a gripping narrative. Extraordinary’ 
The Times

‘Genuinely gripping, consistently entertaining, dazzlingly imaginative’ 
Evening Standard

‘Outrageously ambitious, extraordinarily moving and utterly successful’ 
Financial Times

‘Hilarious, exhilarating, often deeply moving’ 
Jewish Chronicle

‘Serious, funny, yet achingly heartbreaking’ 
Herald

‘Powerful and shocking. Burns with harsh and sincere emotion’ 
List

‘Spectacular – extremely funny, linguistically brilliant and at times very moving’ 
Observer

‘A work of genius. A new kind of novel … after it things will never be the same again. It will blow you away’ 
The Times

‘Wise, funny, unbearably sad. Speeds across the sky like a new-century comet heralding great events in the asteroid belt of fiction’ 
Financial Times

‘Astonishing … a shattering climax. A work of formidable talent’ 
Independent

‘An engaging work of wit and invention’ 
New Statesman

‘Effervescent and recklessly unordinary … so vibrant and playful … calling to mind Philip Roth, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Milan Kundera’ 
The Times Literary Supplement

‘A walloping debut’ 
Time Out

From Chapter 1:

My legal name is Alexander Perchov.  But all of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of legal name.  Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her.  If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month.  He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that.  It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.  I have many many girls, believe me, and they all have a different name for me.  One dubs me Baby, not because I am a baby, but because she attends to me. Another dubs me All Night.  Do you want to know why?  I have a girl who dubs me Currency, because I disseminate so much currency around her.  She licks my chops for it.  I have a miniature brother who dubs me Alli.  I do not dig this name very much, but I dig him very much, so OK, I permit to dub me Alli.  As for his name, it is Little Igor, but Father dubs him Clumsy One, because he is always promenading into things.  It was only four days previous that he made his eye blue from a mismanagement with a brick wall.  If you're wondering what my bitch's name is, it is Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.  She has this name because Sammy Davis, Junior was Grandfather's beloved singer, and the bitch is his, not mine, because I am not the one who thinks he is blind.

From Chapter 2:

It was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B's double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River.  The young W twins were the first to see the curious flotsam rising to the surface: wandering snakes of white string, a crushed-vlevet glove with outstretched fingers, barren spools, schmootzy pince-nez, rasp-and boysenberries, feces, frillwork, the shards of a shattered atomizer, the bleeding red-ink script of a resolution:  I will...I will...