Everything Is Illuminated

A more modern example of the writer as a character in his own novel, borrowing pieces of his own life and weaving them into something more. It is so polished that it is hard to believe it was the first novel. And so personal, in the way it borrows from Foer’s family history (or seems to), that it gives the reader that distinctive shiver of fiction that threatens to burst through the confines of a novel into something like truth—realism that verges on reality.

I tried to weave my own history into my book in a similar way; this book… show more.

What happened to our parents and grandparents had an impact on so many of us. Evident among the second generation of writers, among them Jonathan Safran Foer, the novel, Everything is Illuminated.

By means of dark humor, the author illuminates on the horrors of WWII, which are going to haunt the reader forever. The ghosts of the past are given a voice. The good, bad, and ugly are all accounted for. The guiding principle here is that the past is our guide to the future. Without memory there is no history, each generation inherits history from the generation before, it… show more.

I was deeply affected by Foer’s descriptions of the shtetl in Poland, the cruelty that affected its villagers, and the inescapable effect of this tragedy on future generations. Foer’s ancestry mirrored what I knew of my own family history, and the desire we have to document those stories before they disappear. But Foer alternates the “old world’s” dramatic scenes with hilarity. The Polish blind driver who guides Foer on his search to discover his family’s past employs a “seeing eye bitch” (a dog) to help him navigate the countryside. And his narrator’s constant quirky misuse of English makes for a… show more.