Everything Is Illuminated 
by 

Jonathan Safran Foer (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jun 21, 2016  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: jewish, american 

Funny In a Tragic Way

What would the English of a bright Ukrainian who had learnt it largely from local pop culture and a thesaurus sound like? Hilarious actually. Especially in the telling of a tale which has both been told so many times, and can never be told adequately: the Holocaust. 

There are two protagonists, the author, a young Jewish man off to find his roots in a now famous but obliterated shtetl near the Polish/Ukrainian border; and a young, ambitious lad from a disfunctional family in Odessa who acts as guide and subsequent interlocutor. The author writes history (of a post-modernist sort); the lad writes of the trip and comments on the author's text. 

It is these latter comments that are most compelling because they reveal both the essential irrelevance of the destruction of European Jewry to the lives of those who have inherited the unexpurgated guilt of the massacres, and the way in which that guilt remains an essential but unspoken feature of life. Without the comedic language to make this contradictory point, the book would likely fall flat. With that language, and it's gradual 'normalisation' during the course of the tale, the book becomes a story of revelation.