i'm a very very complex person

Oh my god. You want a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? Read Everything Is Illuminated. That book is just incredible. Jonathan Safran Foer has managed to write a book that is stunning on both an intellectual and an emotional level. There is no experience that can compare to reading a book like that--very little in life can so deeply affect both your intelligence and your heart at the same time. But I should stop gushing and attempt to explain what made the book so powerful.

What most impressed me about the book was the way in which it successfully managed to operate on so many different levels. Not only are there three distinct narratives, but each of these narratives ostensibly has a different author. There's the story of Jonathan's trip to the Ukraine ("written" by Alex), there's Alex's half of the correspondence between Alex and Jonathan, and then there's the history of Trachimbrod as written by Jonathan for his novel.

It's difficult to talk about a book as complicated as this one. It is a novel, but it's also an absurdist sort of "behind the scenes" look at the creation of a novel. It's written by Jonathan Safran Foer, who also happens to be one the main characters and the character of Jonathan is also busy at writing a novel, which comprises parts of the novel that you're now reading. In his letters, Alex often alludes to editorial changes that should be made in both his and Jonathan's chapters of the book, and also discusses points at which the narrative he is writing departs from the truth of what really happened. Actually, it almost seems like the book is composed of exactly what you might have found if you had decided to rifle through Foer's desk while he was in the process of writing the book. Of course, you wouldn't really have found all that stuff, because the book wasn't really put together in the way in which it suggests that it was. And this brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of the book, which is the fact that there's no real way to know how much of it is real. The main character, who just happens to have the same name as the author, travels to the Ukraine to research his roots in order to write a book. He befriends his young Ukrainian translator, and gets him involved in the writing of the book as well. But there's no way to know how any of this corresponds to the real world. Is the Jonathan in the book supposed to be the same as the real Jonathan? Did he really take a trip to the Ukraine? Is there a real Alex somewhere out there? Was there ever really a town named Trachimbrod? By blurring the line between what is and isn't fiction, the book very successfully induces readers to question our notions of history, of fact, of truth, and also of the importance of absolute truth. In the end, does it really matter whether or not Trachimbrod existed? The things that happened there, the way the town was destroyed, those things are real and happened in so many places, what does it matter whether or not Trachimbrod itself ever existed? Either way, it doesn't exist anymore, and that's the important part.

These questions about Trachimbrod bring up the remarkable way in which the town is dealt with in the book. The chapters dealing with the history of the town (the only part of the book that is really supposed to be authored by Foer) all have a very magical realist sensibility to them. Many of the things that supposedly happened in Trachimbrod seem like they could have been lifted straight from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The town and its residents are unique and bizarre, and those qualities make the demise of the town seem even more terrible. Trachimbrod was unique in every possible way up to the moment when its destroyers arrived, at which point it became indistinguishable from every other shtetl that was destroyed in exactly the same way.

This book is also very interesting because of the questions of identity it brings up. From the very beginning, Foer's placement of himself in the narrative forces the reader to wonder about the accuracy of that representation. In fact, Foer raises that particular question himself when Alex basically writes to Jonathan to say that he won't include the fact that Jonathan is short in his portion of the book. The identity questions go further than that, however, because as you read you begin to discover that Alex is also not actually the fabulous Odessa party boy that he initially presented himself to be. Alex beginning to come clean about his identity and revealing the deep emotional impact that the trip had on him is, in my opinion, one of the most moving aspects of the book. So both Alex and Jonathan have adjusted their identities in print, but then you find out that Alex's grandfather has really done what Alex and Jonathan are only playing at doing. He changed his name, moved, and hid his entire previous identity from his own son. So again you're left wondering: What exactly is identity? How do we ever know for sure that someone is who he says he is? There's really no way to be any more certain about a person's identity than there is about the history of a town that may never have existed.

But, despite all of these wonderful intellectual facets of the book, the thing that really got me, as always, was it's emotional impact. I'm not even sure that I can describe just how moving this book was. Every single character seems to have such a deeply touching story, and all are touching in such different ways. There are so many different moments of high emotional impact: When Alex talks about his grandfather's sadness, when Jonathan talks about sitting under his grandmother's skirt, when Augustine tells the story of what happened to Trachimbrod and mentions that the sound of anything falling on the floor reminds her of her sister's death and you instantly think back to the potato that fell on the floor when they first met her, when you learn from Alex's grandfather about what Alex did at the very end, when the grandfather tells the story of his own secret past. And there are even more. It truly is an amazing book. I feel that there is so much more that I could say. I haven't even started on how funny the book is! But I can't. You'll just have to read it.

I'm afraid that this is going to be a rather hard act to follow. The next thing I'm reading is Egalia's Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg. It's our next bookclub selection. I certainly hope it's good, but I don't know how it could hold a candle to Everything Is Illuminated.