The movie version of this book is coming out soon. I saw the trailer when I was with David at Broken Flowers. Which was quite good. So I decided might as well read the book. Right.

Everything is Illuminated is written by Jonathan Safran Foer. Who is also a character in the novel. A character who travels half way across the world to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather’s life when the Nazi’s invaded in World War II. Except he never writes about his trip. The story he tells instead is the story of his ancestors, back into the late 1700s.

We hear only about his actual travels from his young translator both in his account of the experience and his letters to Foer.

And thus we have a novel in three parts. The tales of a small village in a magical past, the apologetic and criticizing letters of a translator, and the events of a young man’s trip to find a woman he knows only by a name scratched into the back of a photograph.

The book is wonderful, the movie however, after watching the trailer again, seems to be an entirely different story.