Marilyn Monroe

"Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer

In hilariously mangled English, a Ukrainian boy describes his efforts to help a young American Jew find the village his grandfather fled in World War II.

By Laura Miller

April 26, 2002 | There are two stories wound together in this first novel, and as is often the case, one is more engaging than the other. The first describes a visit to Ukraine by a 20-year-old American named Jonathan Safran Foer. (You just have to ignore the fact that the device of putting a character with the author's name in a novel outlived its freshness before Foer was born, in 1977.) This part of the book is told by Alexander Perchov, a Ukrainian, also 20, who gets shanghaied into acting as Foer's tour guide and semi-competent translator when Foer visits the country. Like many Jews of his generation, Foer wants to touch the pulse of his roots, to see the village of Trachimbrod, where his grandfather was born and raised, and to meet the woman whose family saved him from the Nazis. The two young men are trading manuscripts, and so the narrative alternates excerpts from Alex's account of Foer's visit and his letters to Jonathan with installments of Jonathan's own novel.

At first, Alex's version of English resembles an out-of-control garden hose turned on full-force and allowed to thrash away on a summer lawn. He's got a thesaurus and he'll be damned if he's not going to use it. After bragging about the number of girls who "want to be carnal" with him, and his propensity for "performing so many things that can spleen a mother," he explains his love for American-style culture: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." His youth and his mangled English at first make him seem simply naive, but that hides a native apprehension that, uninhibited by oversophisticated politesse, can be startling. "There were parts of it I did not understand," he writes of Jonathan's novel. "But I conjecture that this is because they were very Jewish, and only a Jewish person could understand something so Jewish. Is that why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?"

If only the fictional Jonathan's novel were really that esoteric. The manuscript he sends to Alex is a tiresomely familiar thing, a folklorical saga of life in the shtetl of Trachimbrod, full of lusty villagers and their quasi-magical adventures. The Alex sections of the book feel utterly alive and teeter invigoratingly between hilarity and a terrible, creeping dread. By contrast, the Trachimbrod sections only remind the reader of other works -- rehashed Chagall and dime-store Garcia Marquez. There are some pretty passages here, but even these have a framed, almost twee quality. (And, in what seems to be an effort at earthiness, the story also strays into the simply gross, as when a male character with a withered arm uses it as a dildo to console all the widows in town.)

Ordinarily, this caveat would make "Everything is Illuminated" unrecommendable, but the Alex portions of the novel are so good that in the final calculation they far outbalance the book's weaknesses. (Plus you can skim the Trachimbrod sections without missing that much.) With Alex's grandfather (who keeps claiming he's blind and insists on bringing along a "seeing-eye bitch" obtained from "the home for forgetful dogs") as their driver, the two youths head into the Ukrainian countryside and the darkness of the past. Their burgeoning friendship and the way that history and chance keep the balance of power between them -- and their capacity to know each other -- in constant flux, make this feel like a story that, astonishingly enough, has never really been told before.

Foer exquisitely executes the book's best jokes: the way that Jonathan's minor flaws -- his vanity, his American cluelessness, his tendency to patronize -- filter through Alex's admiring portrait of the young man he calls his "most premium friend" and "the hero." As the novel shades inexorably into the tragic mode, and as Alex comes to be a much better writer than Jonathan, with both a finer sense of truth and a more urgent understanding of the need for happy endings, his stumbling English incandesces into eloquence. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

Love and Other Near Death Experiences by Mil Millington

Rob Garland is getting married in two months. Oddly, however, this is the least of his problems. More vexing than the seating arrangements, the choice of wedding stationery - more even that the savagely obscene expense of everything - is the fact that Rob should be dead: and he knows it. Faced with an ultimatum from his girlfriend to either sort himself out, or call the wedding (and the whole relationship) off, he sets about trying to come to terms with how it is that, somehow, he's still inexplicably breathing. After pouring his heart out to the listeners on his late-night radio jazz show, he soon finds himself teamed up with others who really ought not to be alive, but who - for random, meaningless and, frankly, stupid reasons - unaccountably are. And that's when things become yet more worrying: because it turns out that their search to understand why they've each remained oddly alive might very well end up killing them all.
Love, death, religious beliefs, existential angst - Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is a jack-knifing comedy about those things which should be no laughing matter.

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

New Age guru GoodNews arrives just in time to teach crabby middle-aged columnist David how to be a Good person in this piercingly funny novel. But disenchanted wife Katie -- who's been aching for a happier husband (or a divorce) -- is bewildered by David's transformation. How to Be Good is a witty, insightful, and ultimately powerful look at modern values.

Look it's El Perro Del Mar - El Perro Del Mar

Swedish chanteuse Sarah Assbring (a.k.a. El Perro Del Mar) sounds like the saddest Brill Building singer in the world. These eleven tracks ache with longing and loneliness: Assbring sings in a voice that recalls Julee Cruise's spectral quiver, over ghostly girl-group melodies. She sounds like she wants to get over her heartache but just can't muster the motivation, which might get grating if she didn't leaven the mood with be-bop-a-lulas, sha-na-nas, la-la-las and hand claps. The effect is bizarrely soothing, especially on standouts like the faux-cheery "God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)" and the narcotic "Party." Things seem to be looking up on the second half of the record, especially on the relatively upbeat "It's All Good" ("It's all good/Take a new road and never look back"), until Assbring descends into gloom again on the next-to-last track ("Here comes that lonely feeling again"). You can't fault a girl for staying in her comfort zone.

DAVID SWANSON



The Stornoway Way by KEVIN MACNEIL

3. The Stornoway Way, by Kevin MacNeil. It’s described on the front cover flap as a novel which “chronicles the misadventures of an idiosyncratic young Scotsman cartwheeling further and further into a Hebridean hell, railing against the constraints of his extraordinary but vanishing island culture as well as western civilization in general.” Here’s the first paragraph of the first chapter:

Fuck everyone from Holden Caulfield to Bridget Jones, fuck all the American and English phoney fictions that claim to speak for us; they don’t know the likes of us exist and they never did. We are who we are because we grew up the Stornoway Way. We do not live in the back of beyond, we live at the very heart of beyond.

Last Things by Jenny Offill

"A beautiful debut novel, a gently funny tragedy about childhood and madness . . . pokes at the boundaries between reason and imagination." --Newsday

"Offill's deceptively simple prose, her exquisite sense of metaphor and her ear for humor capture the subtle perceptions of this wise child so that we feel to the bone her burgeoning awareness."-Chicago Tribune

"Offill's dialogue and quirky details are truly delightful."-Baltimore Sun

O Curioso Iluminismo do Professor Caritat por Steven Lukes

Nicholas Caritat, estudioso do iluminismo que conversa mentalmente com Voltaire, Rousseau e Kant, pretende evitar envolver-se nas lutas políticas de Militária, estado autocrático onde vive. Embora preso pela polícia, é libertado pela guerrilha que lhe dá o nome de código de Pangloss. Como missão tem que descobrir o melhor dos mundos possíveis para se viver.

Ao chegar aos diversos planetas da sua galáxia, Utilitária, Libertária, Comunitária e Igualitária, pensa sempre ter encontrado o mundo ideal. Com a continuação da sua presença nos mesmos descobre então que nenhum deles é ideal – e que afinal todos têm os seus pontos negativos.
Livro brilhante, divertido e delicioso, que revela teorias filosóficas e uma imaginação literária forte. Teoria política disfarçada de uma brincadeira divertida. Confronta de forma fascinante filósofos do séc. XVIII com as preocupações do século XX.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Review of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four
New York Times, 12 June 1949

James Joyce, in the person of Stephen Dedalus, made a now famous distinction between static and kinetic art. Great art is static in its effects; it exists in itself, it demands nothing beyond itself. Kinetic art exists in order to demand; not self-contained, it requires either loathing or desire to achieve its function. The quarrel about the fourth book of ''Gulliver's Travels'' that continues to bubble among scholars -- was Swift's loathing of men so great, so hot, so far beyond the bounds of all propriety and objectivity that in this book he may make us loathe them and indubitably makes us loathe his imagination? -- is really a quarrel founded on this distinction. It has always seemed to the present writer that the fourth book of ''Gulliver's Travels'' is a great work of static art; no less, it would seem to him that George Orwell's new novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a great work of kinetic art. This may mean that its greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be the pawn of time. Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness.

Nineteen Eighty-Four [1956]

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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

In this comic first novel, two estranged sisters living in England discover that their addled elderly father, a Ukrainian war refugee and expert on tractors, is planning to marry a young, enormous-breasted woman who sees his modest pension as her ticket to capitalist comfort. The sisters put aside their differences, and embark on a spirited campaign to save him from boil-in-the-bag dinners, slovenly housekeeping, and such extravagant purchases as a broken-down Rolls-Royce. In the midst of these machinations—which include long-winded letters to solicitors, venomous gossip, and all-out spying—Lewycka stealthily reveals how the depredations of the past century dictate what a family can bear.

The New Yorker - May 16, 2005