The Book Eaters

I’m in the midst of some serious business, but soon I will be faced with lots of nothing-to-do-ness. You can (probably) anticipate:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer

The Heights, Peter Hedges

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

…and whatever else comes my way.

I bought my paperback copy of this book in an airport in the tenth grade. I was traveling with my friend Sam, who is almost always late and, as expected, was not there to meet me at the airport. I guess I bought the book to pass the time until Sam met me, because in addition to always being late, Sam is very…talkative. I can’t imagine that I purchased the novel with any intention of actually reading on the plane (where I was seated between Sam and a very chatty—but lovely—flight attendant). I guess inappropriate timing is Reason No. 1 why I finished reading Everything is Illuminated for the first time over the weekend.

Reason No. 2 could also be attributed to poor timing.  While I know many people that read this book in high school, I don’t think that I was mature (is that even the word I’m looking for?) enough to finish it in the tenth grade.  The structure of the book is confusing, and I think that I just got frustrated with the use of inappropriate synonyms (most of which I couldn’t define with context clues) in the first section and the inflated language tinged with Yiddish names in the second.  

But I’m so glad I finished it now.

I presume that a point of internal contention for many people who read this book is to what degree they’ll see it as autobiographical.  Everything is Illuminated is a novel; it just happens to have a protagonist that shares not only a name with the author, but a diet, a religion, a nationality, an alma mater, etc.  Jonathan Safran Foer [author] did travel to Eastern Europe in search of the woman he believed rescued his grandfather from the Holocaust (interestingly enough, he also did so without telling his grandmother) just like Jonathan Safran Foer [character] does in the book, but many of the “plot” similarities end there.  For instance, there was no Alex Perchov in real life.

Oh, and now I have to wonder if there’s really one in the book. But I’ll get to that.

Anyway, I think it’s up to each reader to determine how much of the book he or she is willing to take as pure fiction and how much of it will be taken as autobiographical.  Once that’s been determined, though, just pay attention to the prose: it’s beautiful.

It would be a shame to give away the entire novel (because the twist is a big one), so I’ll say this: when you are reminded that it’s a Holocaust text—and there are a few points where you are, though at many others it’s easy to forget—it will be impossible to ignore the talent that Foer possesses as a writer. Like I told my friends after finishing it: I cried like a petulant child during the section titled “Illumination.” Obviously the climax of the book, the section’s combined narration (Alex and his grandfather) is just gut-wrenching. I should say that I not only wept like a baby during that part, but I wept like a baby in public.  Beautifully, beautifully written.

But, there is something that was brought up in discussing this book that I find not only puzzling, but vaguely upsetting.  On page 160 there is an instance that allows—rather, forces—the reader to question whether or not Alex is an extant person within the context of the novel, or if he is merely a construct of Jonathan Safran Foer [character].  It’s confusing, but I wouldn’t put it past Foer [author, and four-time thesis prize winner at Princeton…or something crazy like that] to use metafiction within an already heavily metafictional text to comment not only on fiction, but metafiction as well.  Complicated, but increasingly likely.  Especially once you read the end of the novel.

Which everyone should. Oh, not just the end. The whole, well-planned, well-written, lovely novel.