After describing my favourite book to a few of my cohorts from college, I decided it was necessary to reread it because really, when is it not necessary to read what is one of the best books of all time? (And also to make it clear that this will be a biased post. Just look at my top books section! Also, remember how the more I like something, the less coherent I get? Brace yourselves.)
So! This book is awesome. There are three completely intertwined plots, though it may be hard to see from the get-go. The three plots are: the search for Trachimbrod, in which Jonathan partakes whilst being guided by Alex and his grandfather and Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, the officious seeing eye bitch. Trachimbrod was his family's ancestral home, till the Nazis destroyed it. Plot number two is a telling of the colourful history of the town which turn tells us the colourful history of Jonathan's forebears. Plot three consists of letters from Alex to Jonathan something like six months to a year after the search has taken place. The narrator for everything but the history is Alex. (Maybe it's my Clockwork Orange poster right in my line of sight, but every time I type Alex I feel compelled to add 'de Large' afterwards. It may also be because they compare this Alex's butchering of English to A Clockwork Orange's Alex's butchering of the language. While I'm thinking of it, was that why Jonathan named Alex Alex?)
Also, on the front of the (blue and yellow) edition, there is a reviewer's quote (Joyce Carol Oates, to be specific): "[Jonathan Safran Foer] will win your admiration, and he will break your heart". This is in fact the most appropriate description of the book that you will find.
So. We enter the book guided by Alex, who starts off by describing his family and giving a pretty cursory introduction. At this point I guess I should warn you that this post shall be mainly quotes. Sorry, I know you hanker for my insight and this is breaking your heart, but it's going to be okay, I promise.
"He would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in great volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' ...and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest.' And he would say, 'I am today.' And she would say, 'Today you believe in God?' And he would say, 'Today I believe in love'" (6).
The next chapter is "The Beginning of the World Often Comes" (8), which I always liked as a title, it sounds cool, but I guess I never really thought about it until now. I mean, it really is the beginning of Jonathan's world, isn't it? Or the beginning for what has the chance to eventually begin his world. (It's like in Donny Darko, when Frank makes a point to say your world, not the world, the physical world.) And it would often come because all the time this is happening--potential grandparents and parents and great-great-great-great grandparents are being born at every second.
But, this beginning of the world has come in the form of a wagon that was moving too fast and flipped into the river Brod. Trachim fell in and drowned (as did the horse and his wife), but his baby floated to the surface.
"The only thing worse than to be late to your own wedding is to be late to the wedding of the girl who should have been your wife" (9).
"An angel with grave-stone-feathered wings descended from heaven to take Trachim back with him, for Trachim was too good for this world. Of course, who isn't? We are all too good for each other" (9).
"There were those who suspected he was not pinned under his wagon but swept out to see, with the secrets of his life kept forever inside him, like a love note in a bottle... Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: bought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning... cried with him over yellowing pictures... left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway. Some argued that there was never a body at all. Trachim wanted to be dead without being dead, the con artist. He packed a wagon with all of his possessions... and spurred it into the undertow. Was he escaping debt? An unfavorable arranged marriage? Lies that had caught up with him? Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?" (15).
Alex's following letter: "There are parts I did not understand, but I conjecture that this is because they were very Jewish, and only a Jewish person could understand something so Jewish. Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?" (25).
So, eventually Jonathan meets Alex and Alex's grandfather and, of course, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior. Jonathan is scared of dogs (at the time written, this was the truth about the actual Jonathan Safran Foer) but Alex comforts him: "'She is deranged,' I said, 'but so so playful'" (34). Because of Jonathan's cologne she also attempts to have sex with him. The dialogue is hilarious, but I'll leave some of the book unquoted, I suppose.
Actually, there's something opposite of page 35, while I'm looking at it. The page is bent. I'm not OCD about my books, but for some reason this lone bent page bothers me. It's the only page in the book that's bent, but I know I didn't do it, and I'm sure it was fairly recent. It's like a mystery, but I'm possibly the only one who cares...
The "Book of Recurrent Dreams" chapter may be my favourite chapter (you're going to hear that word a lot in this)--it's a record of dreams, pretty much. The first dream is of feeling completely full of the world and life and utter completeness--"the feeling of not being empty" (37). I like this one because it ends ironically, right after that sentence is this one: "This dream ended when I felt my husband enter me" (37).
"The dream of angels dreaming of men. It was during an afternoon nap that I dreamt of a ladder. Angels were sleepwalking up and down the rungs, their eyes closed, their breath heavy and dull, their wings hanging limp at the sides. I bumped into an old angel as I passed him, waking and startling him... Oh, the angel said to me, I was just dreaming of you" (37-38).
The next dream isn't truly a dream, but a memory: a bird crashes through the window and it dies on the floor. But it continues: "But who among you was the first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?" (38).
"We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered--our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure" (41).
"Could she be dreaming? he wondered. And if so, what would a baby dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife" (43).
"'The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck'" (60). Things I love: this book.
"I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your own life" (77). This drives me crazy! I hate when I think about this, because then I can't help but spend hours not unthinking about this. It blows my mind, for real.
"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside of her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the ideas of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness" (79-80).
"So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell short of what she would have hoped for" (80).
Yankel, in his care for Brod: "They made themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we would never have to hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything else that does" (82). This is my favourite for-real favourite quote from the book. Dear Jonathan Safran Foer, you make my life. Love, Angela D.
"Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine" (84). I feel him. In a weird way, it's the same as knowing you have to work or perform some sort of drudgery when you know your friends are out having fun. You're jealous, or at least sting a little. With no-one left, there's no-one to wish you were, to wish you could see, to fear you'll miss.
"How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much--so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins--without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?" (132).
Okay, so. I've been bad at explaining what's going on, but I can't help. I have trouble explaining things when I'm in the face of greatness. But. Brod marries the Kolker. The Kolker works in the mill and due to a freak accident, gets a gear embedded in his face. It doesn't kill him, but it makes him severely bipolar, to the point where he must be confined so he doesn't kill Brod. During the last months of his life, he is trapped, and he and Brod can only communicate through a hole in the wall. "She cut around the hole that had separated her from the Kolker for those last months, and put the pine loop on her necklace, next to the abacus bead that Yankel had given her so long ago. This new bead would remind her of the second man she had lost in her eighteen years, and of the hole that she was learning is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it" (139). / "People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped"--Unknown. But I understand where Foer is going too. In fact, he and the unknown author may be getting to the same point.
Alex's letter, after Alex reads about this: "If I could utter a proposal, please allow Brod to be happy. Please. Is this such an impossible thing?" (143).
"Your grandmother will find some manner to be content with what you did when you went to Ukraine. I am certain that she will forgive you if you inform her. But if you never inform her, she will never be able to forgive you. And this what you desire, yes? For her to forgive you? Is not that why you did everything?" (144).
"With writing, we have second chances" (144).
Jonathan, at one point, tells Alex about his grandmother: he talks about how he used to hide under his dress when he was very young, and how he used to yell Yiddish words with her off the porch, and how when he would stay at his grandma's she would pick him up at the beginning of the weekend and again at the end. She was weighing him, she wanted him always to be full and fat and healthy. I don't know if the first two anecdotes are true (though I believe deeply that they are), but I know for a fact that the last one is. He talks about it in Eating Animals and an article he wrote for the New York Times in anticipation of Eating Animals that was pretty much the introduction to Eating Animals with minor changes here and there. Just thought I'd mention the tale.
And regarding the murder of the Jews before the death camps even happen, what decimated Trachimbrod for all but a few: "'It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.' 'But it was not the end of the world,' Grandfather said. 'It was. He just did not come.' 'Why did he not come?' 'This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened--there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.' 'What if it was a challenge of your faith?' I asked. 'I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.' 'What if it was not in His power?' 'I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.' 'What if it was man and not God that did all of this?' 'I do not believe in man, either'" (189). I think an interesting tidbit is the "Him to prove this to us". If He is nothing then He cannot prove, but even if He really is nothing as she believes, she still bothers to personify Him, if you will. I just think that's sort of intriguing.
"I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem" (180). Alex says this, of course.
"'But the ring could be a reminder,' he said. 'Every time you see it, you think of her'... 'No,' she said. 'I think it was in case of this. In case someone should come searching one day'... 'So that we would have something to find,' I said. 'No,' she said. 'The ring does not exist for you. You exist for the ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring'" (192).
"AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?" (196).
"The boy raised his hand to smash [the fly], knowing that an example must be made, but as his fist began its descent, the fly twitched its wing without flight. The boy, the sensitive boy, was overcome by the fragility of life and released the fly. The fly, also overcome, died of gratefulness. An example was made" (197).
I love "The Time of Dyed Hands" section (199), and "The Novel, When Everyone Was Convinced He Had One in Him", "Objects That Don't Exist" (207), "The 120 Marriages of Joseph and Sarah L" (207-209), and "The Book of Revelations" (210) from Trachimbrod's Book of Antecedents--
"When the Lord our God breathed on the universe, was that a genesis or revelation? Should we count those seven days forward or backward? How did the apple taste, Adam? And the half a worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp: was that the head or the tail?" (210).
"Do you know that I am the Gypsy girl and you are Safran, and that I am Kolker and you are Brod, and that I am your grandmother and you are Grandfather, and that I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you and you are me?" (214).
"'You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child.' (But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected)" (227).
"The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you" (234).
"It had been such an evening already. Volumes had happened, just as volumes now happen, just as volumes will happen" (242).
"I loved him so much that I madeloveimpossible" (251).
Okay, I know I've been bad and not letting you know what's been up in the story. I can't help it. But here's a huge spoiler alert so perhaps you don't want me finally getting my act together. Aha! You weren't expecting that, were you? But, we learn that in Trachimbrod, as in many other place, the townspeople were all lined up and were commanded to point out the Jewish people so the Nazis could shoot them, and the pointers would avoid being shot themselves. Alex's grandfather pointed to his best friend because he was the only one left. This goes back to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas--people would say they wouldn't do the same thing, but would they not, really? Alex has a superb struggle with himself, admitting that he couldn't do anything but the same. That he would have pointed to anyone to avoid death--he says--writes--"hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse but is it forgivable what he did canheeverbeforgiven for his finger for whathisfingerdid whathepointedto and didnotpointto for whathetouchedinhislife and whathedidnottouch he is stillguilty I am I am Iam IamI?" (252).
"...His head settled into the pillow damp with Zosha's tears and... he understood that he was not dead, but in love" (257).
There's really only one part of the book I hate, and we've gotten to it. As the book winds down, we meet Jonathan's grandfather. Now, after the Kolker died, he was bronzed and people prayed to him and made wishes on him. Safran, the grandfather, goes to the Kolker and speaks with it in the same manner that I imagine Simon spoke with the pig's head. The bronzed Kolker tells his however-many-times grandson of Brod's love through her lack of it: how even though they had to be separated, she would go into his room at night to sleep with him, and in the mornings she would clean and care for him. I hate that, I absolutely hate it. It feels like an over-sentimental admission, like even Foer couldn't bear to keep it wonderfully bittersweet and had to change it. It is awkward and sits badly in the stomach. And it makes me so mad, ughhhhh.
One more thing that bothers me is Alex. I would like nothing more than to believe that this is one hundred percent the truth. But, in Trachimbrod, Alex takes Jonathan's journal and finds a passage about himself: Alex tells his father to leave, makes like to fight him, and tells him: "You are not my father". This scene actually happens within Alex's narrative, almost completely word-for-word. Yes, I know Alex is false--but this makes me question his degree of falseness. Is he like Kilgore Trout? He is fake, but he appears to be very real? It would explain why he can exist very well on his own, and also why Jonathan can still dictate his life. If that's the case, the scene where Alex reads the journal wouldn't be dissimilar to the final scene in Breakfast of Champions, would it? Alex is recognizing the man who is essentially his god and becomes angry, sad, grateful, and then all of those things again--distraught, but never as distraught as Kilgore when he realizes that's not how his life had to have been, it could have been good, great, fantastic, instead of what it was--hard, not entirely pleasant, penniless--and angry because he realized his life is not his own, and misfortune was planned, sad that Jonathan would to that to him, but grateful... Grateful because of what he does have, perhaps, like Little Igor and Grandfather and even Jonathan himself, maybe grateful because he knows he can break from his father...
Then the other degree of falseness would be that, in the same manner that Jonathan may or may not have written his own history of Trachimbrod, by reading that Alex realizes his story must be dictated in falseness as well. It is not necessarily he who is false, but he is obliged to be false for the sake of the story... I don't know. Every time I read this book, this is always the one thing that I constantly grapple with and it constantly drives me mad.
Well, there it is then. I mostly just quoted the book instead of explaining the book, but really, nothing I can say about the book will add to the book. It is amazing. It is illuminated. If you haven't read this book yet, might I ask what you're waiting for? Go now. (As for the movie, I haven't watched it in a few years, but I'm staring at it right now. If I don't do anything tonight, there's a good chance I shall be watching it.) I'm not kidding you...
MLA citation information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. Perennial: United States of America, 2003.
Okay, let's see, what else? I'm back from school for break (I can hardly believe that it's less than a week to Christmas!) so perhaps my reading pace will quicken. Though I don't usually give a preview to what my next book will be/is, in this case, I shall: The Bible. (Do you italicize the Bible? It looks weird to, but since it's a book....) I'm not sure how I'm going to do it... Probably not book by book, but I'm thinking I'll merge a few together that equal about 200/250 pages. I'm only on Exodus thus far, so I guess I won't have to worry for a while, then... I might take a break between the two testaments as well, but I guess we'll see when I get there...
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Time by David Bowie
This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: All I know is I must find a road that leads where nobody goes, so lo, I can roll down all the windows where the wind blows down those fears and foes, so hi
PS. This definitely one of those posts where spell check is going to peace out well before the end, so forgive my slipping fingers.
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