Nothing was illuminated
I just finished reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Foer. Of course, its pleasant enough to read for the fantasy, but in a book dealing with shtetl life and the holocaust, I think its reasonable to expect a bit of 'illumination' too. Instead, it dishes up a series of stereotypes, starting with a crazy but poetic youngster from the Ukraine and it depicts shtetl life through an unfeeling checklist of Jewish cultural icons.
Worst of all is the description of the fate of a Ukrainian village in 1942. Magical realism blends actual atrocities into the twisted fabric of the whole book so that they become unexceptional. It is hardly more disturbing to read of a Nazi massacre than to learn about the hero's great great great grandfather whose skull was pierced by a metal blade following a mill accident.
In fairness, the first 100 pages were amusing. But after the same jokes were milked to death, I started to developed the same boredom that sets in with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both the style and even the story are derivative of Marquez. It's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' with a phoney yiddush accent.
For me, fiction only succeeds if I can sympathise with one or another of the protagonists. But it's hard to empathise with caricatures. The single authentic voice is developed by the Ukrainian character, as he gradually discards his comic strip personality and is revealed to be the real 'hero' of the book. But even there, the problems he deals with are too mundane and the situations too morally stark to care about.
I may have been spoilt by reading A Jewish Life Under the Tsars by Chaim Aronson which depicts 18th century Lithuanian life in vivid gritty detail. It's autobiographical, so the comparison is not really fair. Still works of pure creativity can beautifully transmit the genuine voice of a culture. A few weeks ago Victoria Hanna performed at The Kitchen in NY. Her piece drew out the mystical understanding of the connection between hebrew alphabet and nature of reality. In it, there was more illumination in the way she pronounced a 'pey' than in 50 pages of JSF's prose.
Worst of all is the description of the fate of a Ukrainian village in 1942. Magical realism blends actual atrocities into the twisted fabric of the whole book so that they become unexceptional. It is hardly more disturbing to read of a Nazi massacre than to learn about the hero's great great great grandfather whose skull was pierced by a metal blade following a mill accident.
In fairness, the first 100 pages were amusing. But after the same jokes were milked to death, I started to developed the same boredom that sets in with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both the style and even the story are derivative of Marquez. It's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' with a phoney yiddush accent.
For me, fiction only succeeds if I can sympathise with one or another of the protagonists. But it's hard to empathise with caricatures. The single authentic voice is developed by the Ukrainian character, as he gradually discards his comic strip personality and is revealed to be the real 'hero' of the book. But even there, the problems he deals with are too mundane and the situations too morally stark to care about.
I may have been spoilt by reading A Jewish Life Under the Tsars by Chaim Aronson which depicts 18th century Lithuanian life in vivid gritty detail. It's autobiographical, so the comparison is not really fair. Still works of pure creativity can beautifully transmit the genuine voice of a culture. A few weeks ago Victoria Hanna performed at The Kitchen in NY. Her piece drew out the mystical understanding of the connection between hebrew alphabet and nature of reality. In it, there was more illumination in the way she pronounced a 'pey' than in 50 pages of JSF's prose.
- sheikh X at 9:14 AM
1 Comments:
I stopped reading "100 Years of Solitude" well over half way through. I enjoyed the first third and then it just seem like a chore to keep reading. I kept the chore up for the second third; and then just put it away for a very very very rainy day.
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