Solem-Pfeifer: “Everything Is Illuminated” uses humor, charm mixed with sorrow in masterpiece

As busy college students (dare to dream, right?), a break represents an oasis of time to accomplish everything that's charred to a crisp on the back burners of our priorities.

Break hits and we start making lists of internships to apply for, mountains to climb and novels to write. It's only 20 days or so, but we conceptualize it as some kind of indefinite sabbatical from the grindstone – one that will lend itself to some kind of unfathomable productivity.

But, of course, that's silly.

Friends and family start calling your name because they like you (gross!) and then naps call your name because they want to ruin your life. And you show up back at school, hopefully with eyes less bleary and with a to-do list that, at best, has a couple items marked off.

So my dream of writing a bang-up column on the 21st century canon of fiction (covering two Chuck Palahniuk novels and two Jonathan Safran Foer novels) has fallen short – like way short. So we'll improvise Miles Davis style. You know how Miles Davis used to have musical goals he failed to see through and then played something ostensibly worse and shorter. That guy. We're legends, me and Miles.

So we begin with "Everything Is Illuminated." And in terms of contemporary fiction, boy, was it ever. You can't be even a mild "book person" without knowing the name Jonathan Safran Foer and the implied influence he's had on fiction in the last decade. I'm here to tell you, it's all true. If you're reading the work of writers under 30, you're reading people that have been impacted by the debut novel of the then 25-year-old Foer. Of course, we're talking about a book that critics lauded over (The Times stickered the novel with the always-polarizing "work of genius" tag) to the point that Foer (also the author of "Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close," to be discussed next week) has been saddled with the overrated label, as well. What renders the overrated distinction irrelevant is that Foer went and did what most every writer in his wake is still trying to do - write a novel that's regarded as both great and popular literature in an age when such territory is rarely reached by living authors, much less fresh-faced 25-year-olds.

If you don't know the story of "Everything Is Illuminated," it's as beautiful as it is innovative and touching as it is charming (featuring an overarching tone that's perhaps summed up by a quote from the text: "Humor is the only truthful way to tell a sad story.") The plot of the book exists on several different planes: one that sees "the hero" of the novel (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) journeying to Ukraine to find a woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis, one comprised of letters from Foer's translator, Alexander, to him and one that begins in the year 1791 and continues throughout history describing the past of the Ukrainian city, Trachimbrod.

Foer's prowess functions on two levels and though they might seem like fundamental holdings for a writer, it's rare to find a young author who can marry them so blissfully. The Ukrainian translator, Alexander, one of the most unforgettable characters in recent memory, is an egotistical, defeatist whose skills with the English language resemble those of a child who's memorized the most pretentious words in the dictionary, but has little inkling of how to adapt them from sentence to sentence. The character born from the alternately high and low-minded wordplay is as humorous as he is depressing, boasting of his "premium personhood" and indispensability to the female sex, while quietly admitting both his lies and inadequacies.

In much the same way, Foer manages scenes that appeal to a charming, yet low common denominator of humor in translation error that doubles as a saddening representation of a Ukrainian grandfather's anti-Semitism and personal suffering.

I speak for myself when I say there are too many books that I've heard of and far too few that I've read. On the path of defying that trend, "Everything Is Illuminated" is a great place to embark.

On another note, I'm your new Daily Nebraskan A&E editor, so you can stop sending emails to the venerable Noah Ballard. It's not that he doesn't love you, but at this point I'm more likely to take your questions/concerns/complaints/love letters/diatribes/compliments seriously. Fire away! It's your paper, after all.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer thinks you've got a pretty good thing going. Reach him at chancesolem-pfeifer@dailynebraskan.com.