Everything is Illuminated; A Novel
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Fifth printing [stated]. Hardcover. [12], 276 pages. DJ has some edgewear and soiling. Jonathan Safran Foer (born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), and for his non-fiction work Eating Animals (2009). His most recent novel, Here I Am, was published in 2016. He teaches creative writing at New York University. Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a degree in philosophy,[2] and traveled to Ukraine to expand his thesis. In 2001, he edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe". His Princeton thesis grew into a novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. The book earned him a National Jewish Book Award (2001) and a Guardian First Book Award (2002). Foer shared the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize with fellow authors Will Heinrich and Monique Truong in 2004. In 2005, Liev Schreiber wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel, which starred Elijah Wood. Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005. The book's writing and structure received critical acclaim for the manner in which it switches between two stories, both of which are autobiographical. One of them is the fictionalized history of the eradicated town of Trochenbrod, a real exclusively Jewish shtetl in Poland before the Holocaust where the author's mother was born; while the second narrative encompasses Foer's trip to Ukraine in search for the remnants and memories of Trachimbrod as well as the author's writing-in-progress. Everything Is Illuminated is the story of a young writer named Jonathan Safran Foer traveling in Eastern Europe to find out more about his family's history and its possible connection to (and escape from) the Holocaust. The stories are told through the intertwining voices of Alex, Foer's Ukrainian translator, driver, and general cultural companion, and Foer's novelization of the story of his grandparents. Although Foer's story is moving and intriguing, blending history and fable, Alex's hilarious voice (both archaically formal and littered with pop culture idioms) steals the show. As the novel progresses, however, Alex's rocky English steadily improves, just as his worldview matures into something more tragic and complex. A sharp, startling new voice from an intelligent and passionate young writer, Everything Is Illuminated prompted Adrienne Miller of Esquire to proclaim "One of the most impressive first novels in a long time." Exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving, Everything Is Illuminated is an astonishing tour de force. In the summer after his junior year of college, armed with only a yellowing photograph, he sets out to find Augustine, the woman who might or might not be a link to the grandfather he never knew, the woman who, he has been told, saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Guided by the unforgettable Alex, his young Ukrainian translator, who writes in a sublimely butchered English, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, and an old man haunted by his memories of the war, Jonathan is led on a quixotic search across a devastated landscape and back into an unexpected past. Braided into this story is the novel Jonathan is writing, a magical fable of his grandfather's village in Ukraine, a tapestry of startling symmetries that unite generations across time. In a counterpoint of voices blending high comedy and deep tragedy, the search moves back in time, the fantastical history moves forward, and they meet in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power. Passionate, wildly inventive, and marked by an indelible humanity, Everything Is Illuminated mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching: for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future. Condition: Very good / good.
Keywords: Novels, Jews, Holocaust, Writers, Trochenbrod, Shtetl, Poland, Nazi, Ukraine, Search, Eastern Europe, Investigations, Family History, Grandfather
ISBN: 0618173870
[Book #72963]
Price: $25.00