Everything is enlightened (novel)

Everything Is Illuminated (English: Everything Is Illuminated ) is the first novel published in 2002 by the US-American writer Jonathan Safran Foer . The book was translated into German by Dirk van Gunsteren and published in 2003 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 2005, based on the novel, a film of the same name with Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in the leading roles was made.

action

The main character of the novel, Jonathan Safran Foer , a young Jew from the USA, travels to the Ukraine to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather's life when the Nazis in 1941 the residents of his hometown, the Stetl Trachimbrod , murdered. Equipped with maps, cigarettes and a photo of his grandfather with Augustine, Jonathan goes on an adventurous journey through the country together with the Ukrainian Alexander Alex Perchov. Alex soon becomes Jonathan's boyfriend, and he loves American pop culture, even if he has old-fashioned ideas about it. He works as Jonathan's private guide and translator, although his knowledge of English is not particularly good. Alex 'allegedly blind grandfather is the driver of the car in which the "guide dog" Sammy Davis Junior Junior , who is actually a bitch, also drives. Jonathan has a dog phobia and is also a vegetarian.

reception

The reviews for Foer's debut have been very positive. The critics particularly praised how skillfully Foer linked different storylines. On the one hand the fairytale-like story of Trachimbrod and its former residents is told, on the other hand it is about the action-driven representation of the adventurous search for the place in the present. In a third narrative strand, Alex looks back on the journey together in letters, where the experiences are portrayed in a funny twist and ironically broken. Despite the complex narrative and the sad story, the novel is very entertaining, wrote the critics. "It's so funny and clever, done with so much humor and an excess of small-packaged great wisdom that you occasionally wonder how this could happen to such a young author," it said in the review of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . "A debut that has not been seen for a long time: In his novel" Alles ist Leuchtet "Jonathan Safran Foer achieves the miracle of invented memory," praised the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.