Foer debut novel both funny and poignant

During the first chapter of Jonathon Safron Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated, I laughed so hard that I lost my place. This became a frequent occurrence as I navigated the unique and profound prose of Foer's debut novel -- until the final pages when I found myself having to pause in order to keep back tears. Illuminated is a book that begs to be shared, but its unique structure makes the novel surprisingly difficult to describe. Nonetheless, the novel proves to be an easy read.

The book opens with an introduction from Alexander Perchov, a delightful Ukrainian youth who serves as the narrator for half of the novel. Alex is obsessed with American culture - from Michael Jackson to accounting school - and has a hard time understanding why anyone would ever visit the Ukraine.

But that is just how the novel begins. Alex works for his abusive father's failing travel agency and he is booked, with little qualifications, as the guide for a young Jewish man who is traveling to the Ukraine to unearth his heritage. The young Jew's name, in a strange quasi-autobiographical sort of way, happens to be Jonathon Safron Foer.

Alex has misgivings about his assignment as he says in his quirky way of speaking, "I will be truthful again and mention that before the voyage I had the opinion that Jewish people were having shit between their brains. This is because all I knew of Jewish people was that they paid Father very much currency in order to make vacations from America to Ukraine. But then I met Jonathan Safron Foer, and I will tell you, he is not having shit between his brains. He is an ingenious Jew."

All Foer has to help him in his quest to find the answers to his past, however, is a faded photo of a girl whom he believed saved his grandparents from the Nazis, thus ensuring his existence.

Foer is then thrown into a car driven by Alex's legally blind grandfather, whose "seeing eye bitch" named Sammy Davis Jr. (after grandfather's favorite member of the rat pack) will not stop humping his leg. From then on, Alex refers to Foer as "the hero."

The style of the book is one of its most delightful aspects. There are two simultaneous stories in the novel told in alternating chapters: Alex's accounts of his family and his narrations of his travels with Foer, and the novel that Foer himself writes after his journey. As a transition between the two stories, there are letters that Alex writes to Foer critiquing his work and responding to Foer's criticisms of his own half of the book.

Unfortunately, whenever there are two stories, one is inevitably better than the other, as is the case with Alex's sections of the book, which come alive with a witty exuberance and later, a profound poignancy. The humor comes from Alex's command of English, which he seemed to have learned from a thesaurus instead of a dictionary. Instead of sitting, people "roost"; he does not sleep with women he is "carnal" with them; a good thing is a "premium" thing, and so on and so forth.

While in the earlier portions of the novel, Alex's awkward and clumsy speech illustrate his naivety (about Jews and America) and perhaps remnants of a Soviet way of thinking, his experiences with Foer allow his prose to undergo a transformation so that his later passages are poetic, emotionally mature and insightful, making comments about the importance of family and the relation of one's past to one's future.

Foer's accounts of his journey in the little town of Trachimbrod range from ridiculous to insightful, from melancholy to joyous, and all with an underlying air of mythic earthiness. He creates an entire village complete with their own rituals and customs and an enormous cast of characters, each in possession of their own quirk. From a young girl name Brod, one or Foer's earliest descendents, who was married when she was 14 but spent most of her life alone, to Foer's grandfather, who was born with a limp mangled arm, which strangely enough put him in the good fortune of every women he met.

While extremely imaginative and complex, Foer attempts to illuminate a little too much through the vehicle of Trachimbrod. He attempts to explain the entire history of a village through anecdotes on religion, sexuality, preserving history, and other themes, and how he became one of its last survivors, after the horror of the holocaust.

In the end, however, Alex saves the day and Illuminated proves that it is one of those very rare pieces of prose that is both bitingly funny -- pointing out the ridiculousness of the human condition, of our struggles with our pasts and our uncertainty of the future. Strikingly poignant, Illuminated reminds us of the importance of the legacy of the Holocaust, to remember who we are and where we came from, and to never give up on human decency.