Everything is Illuminated
2002
Postmodern Fiction
Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel, written in his early twenties, in which a fictionalised "Jonathan Safran Foer" travels to Ukraine in search of the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The book interleaves three voices — Alex, a young Ukrainian translator writing thesaurus-mangled English letters back to Jonathan; the present-day road-trip narrative; and a magical-realist generational history of the shtetl of Trachimbrod, Jonathan's ancestral village, leading up to its destruction in the Holocaust. The novel borrows liberally from Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and the wider postmodern tradition, and was a bestseller and major early-2000s cultural moment.