Everything is Illuminated

Everything is Illuminated/ Jonathan Safran Foer/ Fiction / 288 pages/ Reviewed by Matthew

What happens when you throw together a twenty something writer from New York City, An aging half blind Ukrainian driver, his “Officious Seeing Eye Bitch,” Sammy Davis Junior Junior (that’s two Juniors) and Alex, a young man from Odessa who loves all things American, on a road trip to the heart of Eastern Europe? Jonathan Safran Foer crafted an interesting, hilarious, and tragic story that uses an offbeat non-linear style to show how even the most remote events can be connected. In Everything is Illuminated, action is constantly jumping from the point of view of Jonathan or “Jon-fen” as his new Ukrainian friends dub him, Alex the translator and a detached voice describing the past life in the village they are searching for . Chapters are interspersed one from Alex in elementary English, and responses from Jonathan. Mr. Foer does an amazing job writing not only his own parts as Jonathan but also as Alex, who’s letters are a hilarious exercise in broken language that will have you rolling around or scratching your head.

Foer’s book could have failed; such a high concept piece could drown in its own high mindedness or get lost trying to explain the complex rules and customs of his ancestors back in the shtetl that our adventurers are trying to track down. I think that it works so well because the cultural friction and miscommunication really is that funny. The changes in point of view the book uses to weave the narrative may be a little tiring, but the confusion created by jumping from Alex’s letters, then to Jonathan’s responses, then going back two hundred years to Jonathans family history in the village of Trachembrod, shows how everything is connected even when it is hidden and unexpected.

The thing that I liked most about Everything Is Illuminated (even more than Alex’s thesaurus aided letters) was the author’s ability to use the overlapping memories to link events that happened generations before the main characters lived. When Alex and Jonathan finish their search they are changed, each coming away knowing a little bit more about who they are. While its easy to get caught up in the stylistic methods Foer uses for the voices of the different characters, the real beauty of this book is the message at the center of it, that memory and the past will always reveal itself in surprising ways. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in new and challenging writing. This book isn’t for everyone, but to me it was one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read in years.

Before I finish I would also like recommending the recent movie adaptation as well. While much of Foer’s original ideas were left out, the dynamic of Alex and Jonathan rings as clear as in the book. Unlike most screen adaptations of popular books, this one seems to hold its own even if the background is simplified.

Human Smoke

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of the Civilization.
By Nicholson Baker/ 566 pages/

Nicholson Baker takes on one of the biggest most expansive events of the twentieth century with this book that is sure to spark debate and renewed interest in the subject. This is not your ordinary history of the Second World War, there is no thesis, no grand point explicitly laid out for the reader, he even disregards chapters. Instead Mr. Baker lets us make the moral judgment ourselves by giving us snap shots of events, two or three paragraphs each telling both forgotten and infamous moments that led to the bloodiest conflict in human history.

If Mr. Baker has a point he is trying to make it is that the train had run off the rails long before the start of the war. He cites fear of change, exhaustion over the First World War and worldwide depression, isolationism, racism and pure greed, on all sides, as the primary cause of the most terrible conflict in human history. Figures long mythologized like Churchill and FDR are taken to task, not for rumored biases but for statements that are readily available in the public record.
The author also tells us about the true hero’s of the era, not the men who picked up guns behind banners of nationalism, but the nonviolent resisters, the anti-imperialist, the average people who saw what was coming. In all honesty, I had never known about the American Quaker groups in Berlin trying to acquire safe passage for German Jews in the early days of the Nazi regime, the impact of Mohandas Gandhi on the war, or the monstrous ways the British Authorities treated the occupied peoples of Sudan and Mesopotamia during the 1930’s.

As a person brought up on books like Band of Brothers, Guadalcanal Diary, or the films of John Wayne, I know that this book is going to raise a few eyebrows. Baker is an unabashed pacifist and in Human Smoke he pulls no punches, there is no room for good and evil in stark black and white terms. Everything becomes ambiguous, just shades of grey. I recommend this to anyone with an open mind and an interest in the subject of the war who are tired of the normal list of battles and generals.

The World Without Us

The World Without Us / Allan Weisman / 2007 / 336 pages
Reviewed by Matthew

Imagine a world devoid of human life, our cities empty and open to the elements, the suburbs taken over by our pets now liberated (or cursed) with fending for themselves. Imagine the slow encroaching tide of nature running over, taking back what we left in our wake after the human race makes, “the big check out”. In his latest book, The World Without Us, Allan Weisman looks at the world following our departure. Using an irreverent and compelling style of looking at our present environment and contrasting it with the one we leave behind.

Weisman is not being heavy handed, he doesn’t tell us that we are doomed and it’s only a matter of time before our time runs out. This is a book for both the passionate environmentalists and the skeptical members of the audience. In the first part of he spends time describing some everyday things we don’t normally think about that will last long after were gone as well as some things that won’t be around more than a few weeks. Do you use a body scrub? You know, one of the ones with those little blue exfoliating beads? Well those little monsters are going to be around for millennia. How about your little lap dogs? You’re teacup terrier won’t be around for more than an of couple weeks when Earth returns to a more Hobbsian world.

In the second part of this intellectual exercise Weisman gives us a few examples of real places where the world has moved on. His writings on the war town island of Cypress and Chernobyl in Ukraine are particularly memorable because it gives us a view of what happens when large populated urban environments are abandoned in an instant. The vacant buildings, in the case of Cypress he describes the vacant multi million dollar resort complexes built in the 1980’s stripped bare by the elements and in Chernobyl he shows us that when man is gone something will take its place, no matter how irradiated the land is.

I found this book to be at times chilling, and exhilarating. Weisman’s writing vivid and easy to understand, this is not a challenging book to read and you don’t have to have a background in science to understand the concepts he’s talking about. I would even suggest The World Without Us to high school age readers because of the imaginative event he’s dreamed up. If anything Weisman is a passionate humanist, and he shows it by giving us a view of the earth missing his favorite part, us.

The House of Medici: It's Rise and Fall

The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall / Christopher Hibbert / 364 pages
Reviewed by Matthew

The Medici, first family of Renaissance Florence, patrons of Michelangelo, Galileo, Di Vinci, and Brunelleschi, bankers to the nobility of Europe; they thrived by grabbing for power like 15th century Mafioso and they set the stage for a rebirth of artistic achievement and learning. Christopher Hibbert gives us a look back at the family over nearly five centuries in a book that’s richly detailed and peppered with interesting tidbits about them.

The rough streets of Florence, where wealthy families kept control over the neighborhoods with fortified villas and gangs of enforcers, a volatile and unaligned city, a breeding ground for murder and depravity, but it was also a place of intense creativity and radical thought. Hibbert does an excellent job explaining the inner dynamics of this unique place and everyone living there as a sort of mob that gives the ruling families their power. Florence itself is just as important as the Medici, both knew they would be nothing without the other. He vividly shows us how explosive and fickle the city can be, starting the book on the triumphant return of patriarch Cosimo I following a ten-year exile imposed on him by the Signoria. Later he gives giving a gripping account of “The Pazzi plot,” where the Pope and the Pazzi, a rival powerful Florentine family, assassinate Guiliano the head of the family during Easter services only to face the revenge of his brother, Lorenzo, “Il Magnifico,” that plays out as if planned by Michael Corleone.

Of course its not all blood and palace intrigue. We also are introduced to the Medici’s house artists, a who’s who of renaissance thinkers. Hibbert tells us how the Medici were willing to support their artists with schools, apprenticeships and commissions for works. Propaganda and public works took on new meaning as they used their retinue to create masterpieces from the David to the Duomo all the while keeping the fickle taste of the Florentines in mind. These medieval godfathers used their influence to change religious doctrine and place themselves into the highest levels of the Papal authority, protecting the texts of classical masters from destruction by the Inquisitions and religious fervor of the day, and it was all done because of an ingrained passion for truth, knowledge and of course personal gain.

I recommend Hibbert’s book to anyone interested in the renaissance or art; this may even be a good choice for the casual reader of history who wants something more than just cold dates and names. It’s an exciting book and one of the best of many on this interesting family.

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