The trick is that the translator, using a thesaurus to enrich his vocabulary, sees no distinction between common, demotic and poetic words. Don't try to read them at night while someone else is sleeping unless your relationship can survive frequent wakings by deranged laughter. A Jewish vegetarian, the American struggles in a country filled (as Safran Foer presents it) with meat-eating anti-semites.Īlex's imperfect English - in letters to Jonathan and sections of a novel based on the journey - form two of the book's three narrative strands. This sensitive quest is redirected as farce when Jonathan's guides in Odessa prove to be an ancient chauffeur, somewhat worryingly accompanied by a guide-dog, and the driver's grandson, Alex, a would-be translator whose ear for American is as reliable as his grandfather's eye for the road. In Everything Is Illuminated, a young American with the same name as the author travels to the Ukraine, carrying a photograph of the woman believed in the legends of the Safran Foer family to have saved his grandad from the Nazis. But it dares to take the scenic-facetious route towards the Holocaust. So the work which has made its 24-year-old author the new star of Manhattan letters - vast advance, glossy-mag biogs, translation sales - isn't the first car on this road.
Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, which deals with the loss of both the author's parents from cancer and his subsequent guardianship of a young brother, tells of tragedy with the voice of a stand-up comic and the graphic flourishes of a cartoonist. In books, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides treats a quintet of child deaths in one family as social comedy.
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