Read it in: around two weeks
I really quite like all of Jonathon Safran Foer’s works that I’ve read. In both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, he takes something that is conventional, something that is already overdone – in the former’s case, September 11, in the latter’s, the Holocaust – and yet he manages to turn it into a piece of writing that stands out completely from all others.
One reason is that he has a very interesting style of writing. In ELAIC (I’m not going to type the full title every single time) he used pictures as well as words, he put pen-marks on pages, he put text on top of text, in short, the book was full of surprises. This book was less full of surprises in that sense, but it was his first work after all, and we can’t expect a writer to pull out all stops in their first work. They have to experiment a little first, after all.
This book was actually created out of Foer’s university thesis, which traced a period of his own family history. So it seems quite personal to Foer himself, like a private memoir of sorts. He structures this novel in an interesting fashion as well. It’s told through many different means and several different perspectives. There are letters from the protagonist’s translator (in bad English) detailing his day-to-day life and talking about the protagonist’s novel. There is the narrative of the protagonist’s very early descendent, and then of his later descendents. There is also the narrative of the protagonist’s journey through Ukraine to find out about his family history. In short, this is a novel about history and also about the discovery of such history. It is a memoir in more ways than one.
So, as all of Foer’s books do, this one pokes and prods at those deep and meaningful questions as well. It does this in a humorous way and it does this in a very tragic way. He gives us little hypotheses about life as well, small things we never knew about nor would ever think about had we not come across it. Example:
‘THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS
(for a complete listing of revelations, see APPENDIX Z32. For a complete listing of genesises, see APPENDIX Z33.)
The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come. Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual. It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world. It is the subject of extensive scholarly debate whether stillborn babies are subject to the same revelations – if we could say that they have lived without endings. This debate, of course, demands a close examination of that more profound question: Was the world first created or ended? When the Lord our God breathed on the universe, was that a genesis or a revelation? Should we count those seven days forwards or backwards? How did that apple taste, Adam? And the worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp: was that the head or the tail?’ (pg. 210)
I like Foer’s prose, and I like the way he easily strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. His characters do strange things, inexplicable things, and sometimes you don’t know whether to love them or hate them for what they have done. But his characters, overall, are incredibly human, and this is quite refreshing in the current literary world.
For a first work, I’d say this has to be a winner. It’s well-written, an interesting read, full of history, humor and tragedy.
Read it if you: are interested in history, especially Holocaust/Jewish history, like meaty characters, don’t mind experimental literature
While reading listen to: Low Roar The Painter, The Antlers Kettering, The Cinematic Orchestra To Build a Home
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