Almost Awful

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer was a very disappointing book. My wife and I had a long drive over a weekend and we looked forward to passing the time on the road with an interesting book. Always looking for something new, she picked out Everything Is Illuminated, a novel by an author whom we had not previously read. Picking out the book was probably the best part of the experience.

Everything Is Illuminated has a strange and confusing structure. There are two protagonists: an apparently fictional person named Jonathan Safran Foer (the same name as the author) and a young Ukrainian named Alex whom Jonathan hires as a translator. The book consists of three parts, woven together in chapters: a bizarre history of a village in the Ukraine called Trachimbrod, a series of letters that Alex writes to Jonathan and Alex's frequently amusing description of events that occur in the Ukraine as Jonathan tries to find Trachimbrod. Although it was not clear at first, it eventually became clear that the strange history of Trachimbrod was written by Jonathan -- Jonathan the character in the novel, not Jonathan the actual author of the book. Confused? I was.

The history of Trachimbrod, as told in the book, begins in 1791, when a wagon is apparently driven into the Brod River and strange objects float to the surface. An infant girl is rescued at the scene; she is quickly named Brod and adopted by an elderly man (Yankel) who is something of an outcast in the village for reasons that are never made clear. Since many of the inhabitants of the village are Jewish, the village is referred to by the Yiddish term "shtetl," which means "village." In one of far too many nonsense statements, the shtetl is described as divided into the Jewish quarter and the human "three-quarters," separated by the "Jewish-Human fault line," which is a physical line painted through the shtetl. Brod is the great-great-great-something-something-something grandmother to Jonathan, a relationship that is spelled out far too many times in this boring, indulgent and poorly edited book.

Brod turns out to be a precocious child and is raised lovingly by Yankel. He is seemingly well off, as there is no expense spared in her upbringing. Considering the illiterate era in which she lives, Brod gets a lavish education and is showered with books, good clothes and healthy food. I was already scratching my head at the bizarre narrative in this book when I started getting an inkling that the author either had no idea what life was like around 1800 or he simply decided to ignore details that didn't agree with the wild fantasy he was telling.

Brod grows into a beautiful young teen and is the princess of a yearly pageant that the shtetl puts on to celebrate her rescue from the river. When she is 13, Yankel dies and Brod is claimed by a young man who marries her. He treats her well but is soon badly injured in an industrial accident and a large saw blade gets embedded in his skull. He continues to live and is almost normal, with bouts of heavy violence. Brod continues to stay married to him, although he beats her badly during the violent times. They ultimately end up having sex through a hole in the wall so that they do not have to be in the same room with each other.

Sex is laced through Jonathan's history of Trachimbrod. Everyone of all ages has sex, lots of sex, everyplace and all the time. This includes the next important subject in Jonathan's history of Trachimbrod, which is his grandfather, Safron. Safron becomes a stud-for-hire at the age of 10, servicing elderly women in the shtetl. He eventually gets married at 17 after seven years of screwing every woman in sight, including his bride's sister just minutes before his wedding. Although he doesn't apparently turn anyone down, Safron finds all this sex unsatisfying -- even physically unsatisfying. Jonathan's history of Trachimbrod ends with the arrival of the Nazis in World War II.

In parallel with Jonathan's history, Alex describes the events of the trip in which Jonathan searches for Trachimbrod and the woman who helped his grandfather (Safron) escape from the Nazis. The woman, whose name may or may not be Augustine, is pictured on an old photograph that Jonathan brought with him.

Alex's section of the book is written in his often laugh-out-loud funny twisted English. Alex bristles with bravado, and frequently mentions that he has "carnal knowledge" of many women. Alex's father runs the travel agency that Jonathan hires to assist in his search; Alex is Jonathan's interpreter and Alex's grandfather drives the car. The grandfather is described repeatedly as blind, but this seems to not be a problem with either driving or examining critical photographs later in the story. To assist the not-so-blind grandfather is an obnoxious dog named "Sammy Davis Junior Junior." (That's correct, two "Juniors.") Sammy Davis Junior Junior is a female, so she is often referred to at the beginning of the book as "the bitch" in Alex's pidgin English, even well before you have a clue he is referring to a dog. The author just wants to make sure you are suitably surprised, I guess.

Of course, Jonathan doesn't like dogs and SDJJ is all over him, usually in a sexual context. Really, the dog thing was funny once or twice but it quickly became one of several wildly overused tools in this book.

With difficulty, Jonathan, Alex and Alex's grandfather find an old woman who may or may not be Augustine and they eventually find out what the Nazis did in Trachimbrod. You can be sure that it's not good.

Except for a few of the Alex sections, I found Everything Is Illuminated to be boring and far too repetitiously farcical for a book that mines the memory of the Holocaust. The details in Jonathan's Trachimbrod history are so bizarrely abnormal and historically inaccurate that it makes the entire book hard to believe. Further, the pictures painted of Trachimbrod's inhabitants show a shtetl filled with idiots, buffoons and sexual perverts. (What else do you call an elderly woman who pays a 10-year-old boy to have sex with her? Really, it felt a little too kiddie-porn for me.)

From a historical standpoint, Yankel brings home bags of books for Brod when the year is roughly 1800. Books were exceedingly rare at that time and terribly expensive. Yet Yankel brings home books of French poetry, probably written by French poets who were too poor to afford a book. Trachimbrod is a rural village with an economy based on hardscrabble farming; a book would have been very hard for these people to afford. Owning many books would make Yankel the shtetl equivalent of Bill Gates.

Further, the book describes a photograph when the year is given as 1808. Sorry, but the first successful permanent photographic technology was the Daguerreotype, which was developed in the 1830s. Clearly, the book's author couldn't be bothered to go to the library and do a bit of research... or even Google "history of photography."

The history of Trachimbrod is so far-fetched -- and frankly, tedious -- that it can't possibly be anything like an actual history. When the Nazis roll into town, the book suddenly switches from bizarre fantasy to crystal clear observation of Nazi atrocities. I have to admit that it was pretty gut-twisting and depressingly believable to read about what the Nazis did to individuals in Trachimbrod. In particular, Alex's grandfather has a dark secret that he's hidden for many years that leads to a Sophie's Choice moment in Everything Is Illuminated. If this book has any power, it is in that moment but it was a long, hard slog to get here.

Trachimbrod is then wiped out in a Nazi bombardment, another historical inaccuracy. Why waste bombs on the shtetl's inhabitants when you can simply shoot them and burn the town at much less expense? The poor townsfolk run into the river and are drowned, including a woman who rather graphically gives birth as she is drowning. I'm surprised that the author didn't have the villagers all screw each other to death as the Nazis bombed; that would have been more in keeping with the rest of the book.

Really, it was all I could do to finish this book; only a few of the Alex sections and the scenes where the Nazis arrived made it at all worthwhile. The author (Jonathan Safron Foer) writes like overindulged child who has just found his daddy's Playboy magazines and can't stop pointing at the large boobs and shaved crotches. The book is a celebration of repetition and bizarre sexual fantasy, and the overwhelming feeling I had at the end was that the author clearly does not like his ancestors. He treats them all as idiots, buffoons and perverts; although the word "love" is written often, what these people are doing is not love.

If you want to read a good book on the Nazi Holocaust, I suggest Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice or The Painted Bird. This last book, written by Jerzy Kosinski, is a far superior fantasy novel about the Holocaust with images that stick with me 25 years later. On the other hand, Everything Is Illuminated is puerile sexual fantasy forgettably impressed onto a book about a Nazi horror. How the book slipped past an editor in this form surprises me.

As you can tell, I did not like Everything Is Illuminated. There was enough to like in a few places to give the book a grudging two stars but it is barely that. Really, it is borderline awful. I do not recommend Everything Is Illuminated.

If you decide to press on and get this book, its language and sexual content make it acceptable only for the most mature teens and older. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I "read" this as an unabridged recorded book, narrated by two different people: Jeff Woodman and Scott Shina. One read Jonathan’s history and the other read Alex's sections, and I don't know which is which. The reading of Alex's sections was fun and at times very funny, so I appreciated that part of the reading. I came to dread Jonathan’s sections as pure tedium, something to be endured until we got back to Alex. I can't say if this was the narration or the actual text in the book, but I'll say it's a combination of both. I'm not looking forward to hearing Jonathan’s "voice" again.