Everything is Illuminated won the Guardian First Book Award 2002, with a prize of £10,000. The prize aims to recognise exceptional first books, whether in fiction, non-fiction or poetry. A distinguished panel of outside judges, including Irvine Welsh, Kate Atkinson and Kathy Burke, joined with broadcaster Mark Lawson, the Guardian's deputy editor Georgina Henry, and marketing manager of Borders Books Matt Taylor to find the best in contemporary first books.  Uniquely for a book award, they worked with readers' groups in London, Glasgow, Brighton and Oxford who helped to compile the shortlist.

Here is what our reading groups thought of the book.

Bedford Reading Group
Spinebreakers Reading Group
Shipley Book Group

Bedford Reading Group

We did not give ourselves long enough to read this book. Normally there are four weeks between meetings; the pressures of the summer meant that it was a scant three since the last discussion, of Alfred Lansing’s gripping account of  Shackleton’s extraordinary expedition in Endurance. Beset by school summer duties and tying up loose ends before the holidays, we did not at first give the book our best effort. It takes a while to get into. If you start it in an absent frame of mind, the choppy structure of the structure and the highly original narrative language are bewildering. But it repays concentration. Most of us went back to it afterwards, inspired by John’s reading aloud of the hilarious restaurant episode, describing the vegetarian Jonathan, Alex’s frustration combined with total misunderstanding, the potato falling to the floor. Listening, we were rendered helpless with mirth. The fact that it reads aloud so well shows the book’s tribute to oral traditions: the story of the birth of Brod passed down through the years to resurface in the Book of Recurrent Dreams five generations later, the father-to-son renaming: Yankel, Alex. The theme of memory, a sixth sense for Jews, strong as sight and smell, keeping the faith and conferring immortality, is the lynchpin of the whole work.

The pace of the book is brilliantly judged. We settle down to enjoy the comedy of the opening, Alex’s linguistic gaffes rendered with understated subtlety, the meaning of his circumlocutory orotundity often dawning belatedly, with delighted recognition. The appearance of the American, short and bespectacled, a sad disappointment to Ukrainians raised on those whispers that have reached them of the American Dream. The jumps back and forth in time, the fabulous birth of Brod, rising unmarked through the floating debris of the drowned cart, her adoption by the lonely, septuagenarian Yankel-who-was-once-Safran; the garrulous discussions of the Jewish synagogue visitors; together with Alex’s earnest, heartfelt letters commenting on the literary merit of the foregoing to the American stranger, Jonathan, whom he hopes so greatly to impress; all this builds slowly into a rich tapestry of myth, invention, sympathetic humour, while at the same time gathering dark hints for the future.

In the first half of the book Jonathan’s quest to find Trachimbrod gives a focus to the contemporary story. From the moment that Alex finds the woman, who may or may not be the one they seek, the pace of the book speeds up. Augustine/Lista insists on walking to the dark place in the middle of nowhere, forcing them to slow right down, and this change of pace, from the frenetic searching and crazy driving of the earlier pages, marks the beginning of a gathering, unmentionable tragedy. It is the great force of the book that the tragedy loses nothing of its horror and drama when it is eventually unveiled.

We finish the book breathless with horror, and full of questions. Did Alex’s Grandfather, in murdering his friend Herschel by denouncing him, Simon Peter-like, take over Herschel’s life and persona, his wife and small son? How can anything be known for sure, when it was all destroyed; can lives and betrayals be rebuilt from the stacks of boxes painstakingly gathered by Lista and kept in her hovel? The neighbouring village of Kolki crops up all over the place: Brod’s husband personifies it: he has no other name but the Kolker. Jonathan’s grandmother came from Kolki, but does not seem to have encountered her husband in their previous life, even though they grew up just a few miles away. Alex’s Grandfather was from Kolki, the next village to Lista, who turns out not to be the Augustine Jonathan seeks; but do they recognise each other? Or was it the similarity of her experience and the propinquity that unlocked Grandfather’s memories and guilt? Narrative expectations move us towards a previously unsuspected family connection between Jonathan and Alex, cousins springing from the muddled time of war, but Foer cleverly avoids falling into the trap of the expected.

When the long-awaited scene eventually comes, the betrayal outside the synagogue is breathlessly appalling: we read with horror, and a deep, shameful recognition, as the most unthinkable, repugnant acts, are dragged out of the collective memory we all share. Here the mix of narrative styles really comes into its own: the halting conversation with Grandfather, retold by Alex, full of his own parentheses; the dialogue of the shtetl elders, conveyed like the script of a play, the chapter heads, flowing and looping like a snake, in a mixture of lower and upper case, the account itself, speeded up, the words run together, creating a sense of jerky, gasping horror; followed by the account of the last village festival before the fateful day when the Germans arrived and the village died, the last moment of simple happiness defined and sent into suspension in two pages of protracted dots, slowing it down to nothing, that moment before the end of existence. We read, gasping in pleasure and terror, at the daring of the concept, the craftsmanship of its execution, and the reaching into the dark recesses of human history. It is totally original, acutely observed, bewildering, comic, amazing.
 
Spinebreakers Readers Group

The first Spinebreakers group began in February 1998 - initially from a group of mums with children at the same school.  Feeling a need to have an excuse to start reading again - something that had taken a back seat since leaving work to have my daughter, I thought it would be an ideal situation for a good social occasion as well as something to get the brain working again.....  We started with 13 members, eventually dropping to 8. 
Later that year - when word had got around, others became keen to join, I set up Spinebreakers 2 with another 8 members.
We are based in Rye, East Sussex and have members stretching from Hastings to Wittersham in Kent.
We meet as separate groups every 5 weeks, at the home of the person who has chosen the book - each take a turn to choose and host.  These meetings often start with a huge supper, usually inspired from the book we are discussing.

For the benefit of this Penguin Readers Group Diary, members of  both groups came together to discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘ Everything is Illuminated.’ 
 
It inspired an extremely late, lengthy and excited discussion on the story itself and other thought provoking issues pertaining to the subjects involved - and left us with many questions.

We were surprised that this was a first novel because it was such a difficult subject to approach in what at first seemed like an amusing and light hearted tale.

What follows is just a small amount of what we discussed - we talked for nearly 3 hours so to include it all is just impossible!!!

Our First Reactions to the Book

‘It’s got to be the first book I’ve read which is so immediately hilarious.  Each witty paragraph is followed by another more surprising and ridiculous than the last - very very imaginative.’

‘I’d never have read it if you hadn’t given me a copy - but I’m jolly glad that I did.’

‘The cover is like a Louis Vuitton handbag!’

‘Gosh - it was a struggle. My first reaction was that this is quite difficult to read  but I pressed on, although I had to keep flipping back and re-reading bits.’

‘ I wondered if the whole book was going to be written in this Russian/English way - and I thought  phew it’s going to be hard work.’

‘I thought it would make a superb film’

‘I loved the look of it and was really quite excited and looking forward to reading it - and thought the first passage about the cart going into in the river was so exciting’

‘Me too - I struggled through the first third and thought - I am not going to do this - but it was great.’

‘I am so glad I read it - I absolutely loved it.’
What we knew about the author

We knew very little of the real JSF before we started reading - we now know that the book itself had been a huge seller in the US and that there was an enormous amount of publicity here in the UK - the book has featured in many magazines and newspapers and the ‘hype’ had been phenomenal.

‘Some of this must be autobiographical.’
‘He’s such a young author - he lives in Queens - what an amazing achievement for a first novel. What is his other work like?’
‘This is such strong stuff - especially if it involves his own family.’

Our thoughts on the Themes and the Plot

‘I didn’t like the 18th C stuff at all but I thought the letters and the awful holocaust stuff worked powerfully although there was too much about Brod.’
‘I disagree - it was essential for setting the scenes that followed.’
‘Yes - I thoroughly enjoyed the history bit.’

A comment on a few of the characters

‘I liked the dog Sammy Davis Jnr Jnr very much’
‘I thought the names of all the uprights and the slouchers were superb - they sounded like a band of New York Rappers.’
‘JSF was the hero - the personification of the American Dream.’

The grandfather said he was blind  but he was driving everywhere.’
‘I felt this was a huge metaphor for him just not wanting to see the past - shutting it out - but going on that trip just sort of woke him up.’

What were the characteristics of the writing style

‘Alex’s passages really made me think about the meaning of words - his unusual use of the English language was obviously funny but in a thought provoking way.’
‘Is that correct? Is that how a Russian would presumably speak English ? Has he translated and then looked in a Thesaurus to find the remotest word possible that would sort of mean the same? I don’t know if that was realistic.’
‘I thought it exaggerated the style so it became funny.’

‘The language was the biggest barrier for me.
‘I think a lot of the humour was in those translated bits - I liked the way in his letters he would talk about how the author asked him to change a bit ’
 
Was Everything Illuminated?

‘Definitely’

‘What did he mean by that - that there was redemption?’

 ‘I thought I had some sort of insight about the guilt and survival - with the grandfather betraying his only friend.’

‘I liked the humour but thought it was all on the surface - in was in fact a very dark book.’

 ‘I think the feeling that the Jews being hated by all was very true. Yankel wearing his abacus. I must be true - it was happening way before the Nazis. Their history is so dire and dreadful - I can’t cope with evil on that that scale.’

‘It was very very powerful’

‘For a first novel - I thought it an amazingly complex tale - I’ve never read anything like it at all.

Did it remind you of anything else: a book or a film?

‘Fiddler on The Roof’

‘Yentl’

‘Anne Frank’

It reminded me a bit of Atonement by Ian McEwan - that I’ve just read - that the writer has the power to manipulate a story and it’s up to the reader whether they believe it or not - or fall for a device like that - the writer can take you either way.’

‘It brought to mind those images of the concentration camps. Not images of people  but of the pile of spectacles left behind, the mountain of shoes’

Would we recommend the book to anyone?

‘I feel it’s a younger readers book telling about the past but in a contemporary way.’

‘I’d tell anyone who was struggling to get through it - persevere - it’s so completely worth it in the end.’

Shipley Book Group

Opinions were divided on this much-hyped first novel by a young American. Some enjoyed the humour, some merely found it irritating; some found the storyline moving, others obvious and hackneyed.

There was considerable debate on the narrator, Alex, and the way the author creates his ‘voice’ by his misuse of English. We disagreed as to how successful this was as a stylistic device. Some group members found  it amusing and  credibly handled. (From my own experience documents translated from Central and Easter European languages are often at least as bizarre as this). Others found it annoying an difficult to follow. There was some agreement using words in an unfamiliar way could make the readers thing more about the underlying meaning. Alex always signs himself off ‘guilelessly’; he is clearly not guileless in a straightforward sense as his initial descriptions of himself (the girls, the nightclubs etc) are later revealed to be false. However he is essentially truthful and well intentioned character and more transparent than the fictional Jonathan Safran Foer.

We were, incidentally, also divided on the success of making the book’s ‘real’ author a central character who is described only in the third person. It was a clever literary device, but possibly a little too clever.

We did, on the whole, enjoy the characterisation. Alex, his grandfather, and the dog, Sammy Davies Junior, who most people seemed to have a soft spot for. I found particularly amusing the accounts of the vegetarian Jonathan trying to procure a meat-free breakfast and the incomprehension with which he is met. We agreed that their picaresque travels were a success and enjoyed the comic roller-coaster that the journey became but were less sure about the tragic conclusion of the story, the Nazi massacre of the village and the grandfather’s involvement in the murder of his friend Herschel. It didn’t quite work for me or for some other group members. I found it handled too melodramatically , although this view was not unanimous.

There was considerable criticism of the sections of the book (presumably the fictional Jonathan’s novel) narrating the history for the Trachimbod. Some group members enjoyed the magic realism more than others. I described it as ‘an uneasy blend of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isaac Bashevis Singer,’ which I though at the time was rather acute, but was later mortified to discover was a comment made in every other review of the book in existence.

I am glad that we had the opportunity to read and discuss the novel as it received a mixed reaction from the group and so  provoked a livlier debate than a novel we unanimously admire.