I am halfway through the book that Rob gave me last week. It is called "Everything Is Illuminated," by Jonathan Safran Foer. I have just been reading it on the train to work in the morning and in the evening on my way home. I have laughed uncontrollably and even shed a couple of discreet tears in response to the exquisite illusory realm that I have been brought into by Foer's remarkable skill at imagery and humor.
He is wildly funny like David Sedaris and beautifully tragic like Gabriel García Marquez.
I can't get enough of Alex, the "most humorous" Ukrainian who narrarates some of the book. It has me alternating between being in stitches over his hysterical personality and having my heart torn out by the incredibly sad story that is the reason for all the humor. The main character is the author. He travels to Ukraine to find an ancient woman named Augustine who saved his grandfather during the war. He simultaneously tells the tale of his jewish ancestors dating back to 1791. That is a sort of intricate and mystical world as it deals a lot with dreams and those things that are felt but never said and said but never genuinely felt. That is how Foer writes. One way and then he turns around and goes the other way. It is sort of tangled and surreal, but that is what makes it so captivating.
The fable of his very great grandmother Brod and her adopive father Yankel is full of both sorrow and joy (she doesn't know that Yankel is not her real father and he never tells her). At 15 she marries a lovely man Kolker. That is a story that begins with both sorrow and joy, then becomes deeply heartbreaking and ultimately becomes spun into an incredible web of all three.
I don't think I've been this moved by a book since I read A Hundred Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera and I haven't laughed this hard at a book since I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, but it makes me want to read them again. I suppose I should enjoy the rest of this one first.
Posted by Maria at May 15, 2003 09:24 PM