July 24, 2013
I am on edge. I had an interview yesterday morning, my last shot at a full-time teaching position for next year, I think. It went well, I guess, and I know that they will decide on it quickly, with school right around the corner. But I am anxious to hear back, even after just a day. With my summer class ended, and only working a little bit more at my jobs, I am trying to immerse myself in my reading, while I wait and sweat it out, and at the very least, I am grateful to have some time to at least do that.
There seem to be, on the whole, two popular opinions of Safran Foer. On the one hand, he has been praised as being an experimental young writer, an important voice for this generation or something like that. On the other hand, many have claimed that he is overrated, and that he often assaults the reader's emotions (like with his references to 9/11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or the references to the Holocaust in the novel that I just read) in order to add "poignancy" to his work. I find myself feeling torn about him personally, after reading just this work (which he wrote when he was 23, younger than myself...I don't really care what anyone else says about it, I do find that impressive). What I felt like he had here were two very powerful stories...but in attempting to tell them both, he kind of sold them both short.
The story is actually very well structured, considering the mismatched narrative. The novel can be grouped into sections. Each section begins with a chapter told from the perspective of Alex (aka Sasha), a young Ukrainian university student who lives with his parents (a timid mother and an overbearing, very abusive father), and his younger brother, whom he adores. Alex is a pretty typical young man to begin with; he eagerly follows Western culture (to the best of his abilities), jokes around, and claims non-existent sexual conquests. I found Alex to be endearing, and his narrative was charming, somewhat in the same way that the narrator's strange English was charming in Pygmy. But Alex is not crude (usually...his referring to the dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, as a "bitch," might be jarring to seem, though technically correct); his strange English is often silly. The title of the novel is a reference to two things, one of them being Alex's use of the phrase "it was illuminated" to mean "it was understood." Kind of ironic, when I think about it...let me explain.
So Alex's story is very interesting, as is the story of his family, which is pieced together through Alex's letter's to the fictional character Jonathan Safran Foer (who was almost unnecessary in this book, yet was the one kind of tying things together). The author has been criticized for using himself as a character in his novel. I was confused, wondering if the sections about Alex were based on real life, if Safran Foer really had traveled to Ukraine to try to learn about his grandfather, and how he escaped from the Nazis. Not quite...from what I've been able to find, hardly any of it is true. Strange, then, that he wouldn't give his own character another name.
But he is the one telling the other part of the story. The way the book is set up, it seems that Jonathan is sending the chapters to Alex to have him read them over and give his opinions. Alex often criticizes the story when it is sad, though he gets into it. I do, too; this is the second story being told in this book. It begins like something of a fairy tale fantasy, telling the story of fictional Trachimbrod (based on a real Ukrainian Jewish shtetl that was destroyed by the Nazis, as depicted in the destroying on Trachimbrod in the novel). The people of late 18th and early 19th century Trachimbrod are whimsical characters. The main character is Brod, a girl who was found as a newborn baby floating in the river Brod after a wagon, believed to belong to a man known as Trachim, crashed into it, overturning. No other bodies were ever found, so Brod's origins could only be speculated.
The Jews of Trachimbrod are a strange sort. There are all kinds of strange anecdotes sprinkled through the book, like the story of the Upright congregation and the Slouchers, and how Brod's husband survived for two years with a saw in the middle of his head (though he was prone to violent tempers). Brod seemed to have the ability to see into the future; she knew that she would be raped on Trachimday when she was 13. Her death is never explained; only the death of her husband, and how her family line continued on down to Jonathan's grandfather, who was still living in Trachimbrod when the Nazis invaded.
Then, there's the story of this grandfather himself. I cannot tell if Safran is based on any actual, real person. If he is, then I must share in Alex's shock at the details of his part of the story. He had been sexually active since the age of 10, because women of all ages and experiences were attracted to his dead arm. He was born with teeth; it is never explained why. He does not have his first orgasm (in other words, does not come for the first time) until his wedding night, when he impregnates his young wife. His child is born in the river Brod when the Nazis invade, after the people panic and jump in during their Trachimday celebration, when it is interrupted by bombing. Safran is saved...that's the link between these fantastical stories of the past and Jonathan's present mission. He goes to the Ukraine to find out about Augustine, a woman whom he believes saved his grandfather. That's how he meets Alex, who is a tour guide for his father's company, and Alex's grandfather, who has his own interesting story of tragedy about the war (and whose part of the story is, in my opinion, left somewhat unfinished).
They never find Augustine. They do find a woman, the only survivor left near Trachimbrod, who punishes herself for surviving by holding on to all of the things left behind by those who were killed, and living in desperate squaller. Grandfather's heart is wrenched by this woman; he, having witnessed the murdering of the Jewish population (including his best friend Herschel) in an adjacent village, is touched and wants to help her, even though she is not really the Augustine that they are seeking. He later wants to find the real Augustine, as though he can atone for his own guilt from the war. But he is unable to do this, and he kills himself. The last letter addressed to Jonathan is from him, basically his suicide note translated by Alex, not from Alex himself, who for some inexplicable reason has become very angry at Jonathan, when they had previously had such good rapport.
I feel a little cheated to not have known about Augustine, either. I mean, if this whole thing had been based on a real search by the author that had come up almost empty, I could accept it, because that's life. But I think that I share Alex's opinion that the writer has the ability to shape the story himself (or herself), and if a writer can create the world, why not create the world as it should be? Yet the author himself wrote those words, he wrote the whole thing. He is Alex, and he is Jonathan, and he isn't either one of them. But I just feel like there should have been more, even if it wasn't tied up neatly in a literary ribbon. Whatever happened to Brod, anyway? And I would want to know more of Alex's childhood. The abuse that he and Little Igor suffer at the hands of their father is more than alluded to, but why would Alex stay? Just...I wanted more, and with the two parts of the story (perhaps three, if Brod and Safran's stories can be viewed separately), I just feel like they were incomplete.
I did find the author's depiction of modern-day countries, which had lost their Jewish populations. Some of the people claimed to have "never seen a Jew," and one young woman was fascinated that Jonathan did not have horns. Prior to the war, the Jewish population was kept separated from the other Ukrainians (the line separating Trachimbrod from the rest of the village is called the Jewish/Human fault line), and violent pogroms were not unknown in their history. In Western countries, anti-Semitism is not socially accepted, and people on the whole are fairly knowledgeable of the Holocaust (though there are still crazies who would deny it). So it can be jolting to think that, in these places where it was actually happening, people would be clueless about it to this very day. But perhaps they are like Alex's grandfather, who actually lived it, and wanted to forget. Guess you can't blame them at that.
I did enjoy this novel, and I got into it, but I don't feel like there was any closure. It doesn't even seem like the relationship between Jonathan and Alex was mended, and that's a shame. It seemed that, contrary to the novel's title, nothing was illuminated. The stories of the past did not enrich the stories of the present, but in this case, rather took away from them (or maybe the other way around?). This brings up an idea that Stephen Colbert brought up on his show last night, when he was interviewing Kenneth Goldsmith, who gathered transcripts from radio broadcasts that were breaking news of national tragedies or significant events (Seven American Deaths and Disasters sounds fascinating in itself, even though the author looked like a kook in his pink suit and his mismatched Day-Glo socks and enviable whimsical facial hair, so I'm going to add it to my reading list). Colbert, more to get the author's goat than anything else, asked, "Why do we need to go back and relive these terrible events? Shouldn't we forget about the past?" I mean, he knows better than that, but the author lost his cool and was unable to answer. It was pretty funny, although up until that point he'd given a good explanation for the premise of his book (hell, I bought into it). But Colbert's question should be considered.
The answers that we've always given for examining the past have always been the same. You know, "if you don't know history, you'll be doomed to repeat it" or something like that. Obviously, the Safran Foer's intention with including the Holocaust here was not for Holocaust awareness (we've plenty of that in Western nations, I think, and perhaps need more attention shown to how such atrocities have occurred since then, in spite of the "intentions" of our leaders). So really, we do know our history (sort of...are we focusing on the right things?), yet we've still be doomed to repeat it. Goldsmith made the point that disasters will continue to happen, on and on and on, and he's unfortunately right. Can we anticipate it? Can we stop it? Which leads to the question: what was fictional Jonathan's mission in going to Ukraine? What did he hope to find? What did he really find?
Even after examining the book more closely with this entry, I still feel torn about it. Frustrated, on the one hand, yet so much of the story (particularly Alex's situation, and Brod's magical tale) was so interesting. What I know I must do is give Safran Foer another chance. I will aim to read another book by him, and sometime in the near future, I think. But as I sat down to write out a tentative list of books to go through next (I'm trying to get a healthy mix of "classics" and worthwhile contemporary reads), though, I only finding it getting longer and longer. I find that more exciting than overwhelming now. I don't know if or when I'll complete 1000 books, but I'm already satisfied with the variety of books that I've read so far. I think that if I get the job that I want, I will create a collage of book covers: books I've read and loved, books I've not loved so much, ones that I want to read. I will put it in my classroom, and explain to my students that those books, and so many more, make up my literary experience. That's what I really aim for, and what I want to help my students to appreciate: authentic literary experiences, like reading a popular book and having an opinion on it to share. There's nothing magical about books in themselves, but as it is pointed out in this book, "everyone has a novel" (or at least thinks they do), and some of these novels really are worth reading.
Was this one? I would say yes...but it alone would never satisfy me, and so my literary mission continues on.
 | ||
A Polish-Jewish shtetl adjacent to the village of Auschwitz. Obviously, this would be prior to World War II. In Eastern Europe, apparently, Jewish populations who did not live in urban areas lived in these shtetls. The one in this picture was a poor community, as was the entire community of Auschwitz. It would be implied that the people of this shtetl suffered the same fate as those in the fictional Trachimbrod, or that they eventually ended up in the death camp.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment