The Bibliophile's Devotional by Hallie Ephron

Author:Hallie Ephron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

JUN.

29

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.

THE NOVEL’S OPENING line is a twist on “Call me Ishmael,” and from then on the prose is startling and funny with a story that caroms into unexpected places. The narrator, Perchov, is a young Russian. His tortured English is good enough for his job as translator for Heritage Touring, his father’s travel agency, which arranges trips back to the “homeland” for American Jews.

Perchov accompanies a tourist whose name is “Jonathan Safran Foer” (Perchov calls him “Jon-fen”) who seeks the Ukrainian town of Trachimbrod. There he hopes to track down Augustine, the beautiful woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. They are accompanied by a driver, Perchov’s grandfather, who suffers psychosomatic blindness, and a particularly stinky dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

Like a nest of Russian dolls, the novel is composed of stories within stories. Perchov writes of the trip to the Ukraine in retrospect, sending chapters to Jonathan who then makes corrections (for instance, he changes a description of himself from “severely short” to “like me, he was not tall”). Meanwhile, Jonathan sends Perchov chapters of a novel he’s writing, an epic magical realist fable about Trachimbrod.

“Everything Is Complicated” might be a more appropriate title, but complexity reveals itself in layers that surprise and delight. From laughter, profound themes emerge. This extraordinary first novel was published in 2002.

“Not since Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio.”

—FRANCINE PROSE, NEW YORK TIMES

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