![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The novel has been compared with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and other contemporary works in that Foer's narrative involves time shifts, different narrative voices, and a melding of fantasy and reality. The result is a stylistically and thematically diverse piece of literature that Foer has described as a "collage." Foer has said that he wrote it in two and a half weeks and then edited it for two and a half years, working on it more in pieces than as a whole. Yet, his imagination remained fertile with ideas, and he began Everything is Illuminated as a novel. That endeavor stalled because Foer was paralyzed by the question of whether it is befitting, or even possible, to imagine situations related to the Holocaust. When Foer returned to Prague, where he was studying at the time, he was inspired to write a fictional work about his experience. But Foer found neither Trachimbrod nor the woman in the photograph during his trip. Like the character Jonathan, Foer did not tell his grandmother he was returning to Ukraine. His grandfather was from a shtetl called Trachimbrod and, like Safran in the novel, he had only a photograph of the woman who supposedly saved him from the Nazis. When he was twenty-one, Foer traveled to Ukraine to research his grandfather's life. Only the core of the novel is based in fact. Foer completed a full manuscript of the book while an undergraduate at Princeton under the mentorship of Joyce Carol Oates. Everything is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |