Everything Is Illuminated
Encyclopedia
Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...

, published in 2002
2002 in literature
The year 2002 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*March 16: Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested and jailed poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired a newspaper editor following the publication of Musalam's poem The Corrupt on Earth that criticized the state's Islamic...

. It was adapted into a film by the same name
Everything Is Illuminated (film)
Everything Is Illuminated is a 2005 adventure/dramedy film, written and directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz...

 starring Elijah Wood
Elijah Wood
Elijah Jordan Wood is an American actor. He made his film debut with a minor part in Back to the Future Part II , then landed a succession of larger roles that made him a critically acclaimed child actor by age 9. He is best known for his high-profile role as Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's...

 and Eugene Hütz
Eugene Hütz
Eugene Hütz , September 6, 1972) is a Ukrainian-born singer and composer, most notable as the frontman of the critically acclaimed New York Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Hütz is also a DJ and actor.-Early life:...

 in 2005
2005 in film
- Highest-grossing films :Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top-grossing films that were first released in the United States in 2005...

.

Plot summary

Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew, journeys to Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

 in search of Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 liquidation of Trachimbrod, his family shtetl
Shtetl
A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until The Holocaust. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania...

. Armed with maps, cigarettes and many copies of an old photograph of Augustine and his grandfather, Jonathan begins his adventure with Ukrainian native and soon-to-be good friend, Alexander "Alex" Perchov, who is Foer's age and very fond of American pop culture, albeit culture that is already out of date in the United States. Alex studied English at his university, and even though his knowledge of the language is not "first-rate", he becomes the translator. Alex's "blind" grandfather and his "deranged seeing-eye bitch
Guide dog
Guide dogs are assistance dogs trained to lead blind and visually impaired people around obstacles.Although the dogs can be trained to navigate various obstacles, they are partially color blind and are not capable of interpreting street signs...

," Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr., accompany them on their journey. Throughout the book, the meaning of love is deeply examined.

The writing and structure received critical acclaim for the manner in which it switches between two story arcs: (1) fragments of Foer-the-character's novel-in-progress, where he tells in highly literary English a quasi-magical story about the citizens of Trachimbrod; and (2) a straightforward narrative of searching for Trachimbrod (an invented name for the real village Trochenbrod
Trochenbrod
Trochenbrod or Trohinbrod in Russian was a Jewish shtetl with an area once located in western Ukraine, about 30 kilometers northeast of Lutsk, the nearest now existing villages are Яромель and Клубочин ....

), as told by Alex in broken English. They are tied together by letters sent from Alex to Foer and attached to Alex's version. Alex's narrative is notable for its broken English, which sounds as if he learned English from a thesaurus without ever hearing it spoken. Throughout his narrative, he makes frequent use of improper synonyms, such as using the word rigid to mean "difficult" or "hard".

Place names

Names of cities are given in their Russian version (e.g., Lvov), although the Polish or Ukrainian naming would have been correct for the scenes in Trachimbrod and Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

.

Literary significance and criticism

Upon its initial release the book received positive reviews. The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

review stated that the book was "a work of genius," that Foer had "staked his claim for literary greatness," and that "after it, things will never be the same." More recent reviews of the novel, particularly those who examined it alongside Foer's next book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Two years before the story begins, Oskar's father dies on 9/11...

, have been less generous.

In a Huffington Post article entitled "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers", Anis Shivani sees the work as "harmless multiculturalism for the perennially bored" and claims that "a more pretentious 'magical realist' novel was never written." A reviewer from The Prague Post
The Prague Post
The Prague Post is an English language weekly newspaper covering the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe.It is the only English-language newspaper in the Czech Republic...

laments that the book misrepresents the history of Jews in Ukraine and that the factual history of the massacre at Trochenbrod "...stands in a sharp contrast to claims made in the book." He finds particularly objectionable the fact that, in the novel, Foer described the Ukrainian treatment of Jews as "almost as bad as the Nazis", when in fact it was Ukrainians who helped the escape of the few Jewish survivors from Trochenbrod, and suffered brutal retaliation themselves as a result.

Although unconfirmed by Foer, it is speculated that the title of the book is an inspiration from a line in the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being , written by Milan Kundera, is a philosophical novel about two men, two women, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in France...

by Milan Kundera: 'In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.'

External links

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