intellectual post about literature
Has anyone read 'Everything is Illuminated' by Jonathan Safran Foer?
I finished it last week and it has been playing on my mind ever since. I loved it, but it also worried me. I have a nagging suspicion that I missed the point, and was hoping someone would be able to tell me exactly what the point was.
I was totally sucked into the bizzare dreamlike village and it's almost cartoon-like inhabitants but was constantly concerned about where the line between reality and imagination of the main characters lay. I was also fretting about the seemingly semi autobiographical nature of the story, with the author placing himself as one of the main characters - a writer who was telling the story of searching in his family history.
But mainly I was worried that I missed the entire connection between Jonathan and his Ukranian translater and their families. Was there a connection? Did I drop off at the crucial revelation stage?
I think I will have to read it again in a month or so. If you haven't read it I would recommend it, it's a highly unusual piece of fiction.
lar-di-dar - get me! I could be on BBC Radio 4. (Apart from the bit where I might have missed the crux of the whole book.)
I finished it last week and it has been playing on my mind ever since. I loved it, but it also worried me. I have a nagging suspicion that I missed the point, and was hoping someone would be able to tell me exactly what the point was.
I was totally sucked into the bizzare dreamlike village and it's almost cartoon-like inhabitants but was constantly concerned about where the line between reality and imagination of the main characters lay. I was also fretting about the seemingly semi autobiographical nature of the story, with the author placing himself as one of the main characters - a writer who was telling the story of searching in his family history.
But mainly I was worried that I missed the entire connection between Jonathan and his Ukranian translater and their families. Was there a connection? Did I drop off at the crucial revelation stage?
I think I will have to read it again in a month or so. If you haven't read it I would recommend it, it's a highly unusual piece of fiction.
lar-di-dar - get me! I could be on BBC Radio 4. (Apart from the bit where I might have missed the crux of the whole book.)
posted by Rach at 13:34
2 Comments:
We read this at book group - a group to which I no longer belong as I missed too many meetings and was often too caught up in another book to read the one chosen by the group. Bad person.
Anyway this one was one that I did actually read and was left feeling - and what? I enjoyed the read - though it was a bit Ali G at times - but I felt sort of dropped at the end.
J
x
yes, thats what I thought. It got to the end and I was left feeling I'd missed something important when maybe I hadn't. It just kind of ended abruptly and unsatisfactorily.
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