"Everything is Illuminated"

"Everything is Illuminated"
Jonathan Safran Foer
Harper-Perennial, $13.95






It's hard to pick out the good in a book more or less about the Holocaust. But it's hard to pick out the bad, too.

The main character, who shares his name with the author, is an American college student who sets out on a journey to Ukraine to learn about his grandfather. He is guided by Alex, who is the same age and an ardent admirer of everything American, Alex's grandfather, also named Alex, and Alex's grandfather's "seeing-eye bitch," Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. The younger Alex serves as a translator for Jonathan, who speaks only American.

Jonathan's grandfather escaped the destruction of his shtetl by the Nazis with the help of a woman named Augustine. Armed with the photograph and name of the town, Trachimbrod, the troop sets out hopefully to find something.

But the story isn't told that easily. Foer jumps between Jonathan's novel about his family's history (beginning in the 18th century), Alex's story of the journey to Trachimbrod and their discoveries, and Alex's letters to Jonathan in America.

The best written parts of the book are from Alex, though Jonathan is the one with hopes of becoming a writer. Jonathan's story involves too many sexually explicit stories that don't serve much purpose to the rest of the book, other than perhaps letting us know that even 200 years ago there was heavy primiscuous activity occuring. It's explicit and mostly unnecessary.

Jonathan's story starts with his many greats-grandmother, but after her story is done, jumps to his grandfather. It was set up as though it would contain a more detailed description of his family's history, but perhaps he only saw his many greats-grandmother and his granddather as the only important parts. Besides, with all the intercourse he had to write about, there wasn't much time for him to mention other people from his lineage.

The story from Alex's point of view is more depressing. Here is where we learn the truth about what happened in Trachimbrod and during World War II. But these chapters in the book are also the funniest and most entertaining because of Alex's style of writing in English. The man's desire to use American slang coupled with his obvious use of a thesaurus lead to truely amusing passages that made me laugh at how ridiculous some American sayings must seem to outsiders.

Alex also complains that the characters in Jonathan's stories should be happy and should have happy endings. But they don't get that. And Jonathan doesn't either. There is only sadness and shock in learning about the past and the hate the Nazis displayed to his family and their town.

Finishing this book doesn't give the reader a happy ending either. There are still questions that are unanswered and will always remain that way. There isn't the closure that Alex expects all stories to have.

So there's good and there's bad. Foer took a sad story and wrote it in a way that could be comical — and at some parts is actually laugh out loud funny. He has a talent for creating characters that the audience can imagine and predict, complete with their personalities, quirks and speeches.

Foer has written a fake real story, and it hurts to know that there is truth behind this fiction.