If you told me that Everything Is Illuminated is your favorite book, I would get it. I would understand. I would respect your choice. It is an ambitious book about sadness and love and forgiveness. It has moments of beauty. But ultimately, for me, it fell short of what it was trying to accomplish.
I loved every chapter that is Alex Perchov telling about leading the American Jew, “the hero,” on a search for his past in the Ukraine. I loved every letter from Alex back to “the hero” in the U.S. after their trip. What hung me up was the magic realism. That’s where I felt it got ugly for ugliness’ sake. A ten-year-old boy having sex with old, widowed women is not a metaphor that is ever going to work for me. Turning a 13-year-old girl into the sexual object of a village made me uncomfortable. As bad as Lolita.
I can take ugliness when that’s what needs to be there. When there’s no escaping it. I might cover my eyes, but I understand its purpose. There are some very hard, very ugly things that happen in the “real” narrative parts of the book that I don’t object to, that, of course, have to be there.
I think the whole fantasy/dream/magic realism stuff is hard for me because it is invented and it feels invented. It’s like I’m being sat on a rug with a mug of hot chocolate and being told “a story.” There are no rules. Anything goes in the land of make believe, so to me, nothing is grounded. Nothing really matters.
Do I want too much from books? Am I looking for more than just a great book that stands on its own and uses its own voice and surprises me and compels me to go forward? Am I looking for a book whose every word I agree with? A book that I want to have written myself? Are we all?
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8 comments:
Christine-
The good thing about books is, essentially, they are like anything else: you don't have to feel compelled to like them just because they exist. Just because someone took the time to write it, you took the time to read it, someone else might absolutely love it...it all means absolutely nothing. If you don't like it, you don't like it. You can't force yourself to like it, and why should you? On the other hand, you shouldn't force yourself to NOT like something either, which is why you ended up plodding through this book even though you felt you may not like it, so kudos to you! :)
My comment is all squashy :P
Do you want to much from books? No. Do you want more from your books than I do? Yes. I enjoyed the magic-realism in Like Water For Chocolate and the Isabelle Allende books, but I've never made a decent inroad into that famous one about solitude...what is it again, C? I want my books to stimulate my intellect or allow me to escape, both are good.
I suppose that what I look for in books changes, because life changes so much. Sometimes I have had no patience for fantasy, and at other times, it fascinated and fueled me to think about situations in a different way, to set up a different standard of rules by which the characters have to relate to.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cook? I read that for a class once. Everything Is Illuminated reminded me of it, too, with the relations going back, back, back and having similar names.
I suppose what I want from books changes as my life changes, too. Although I always seem to be looking for that same good art buzz, all the capitalized words: Beauty, Poetry, Truth.
Although it has been years, "Dune", I think, was a book of fantasy, and Beauty, Poetry, and Truth.
That makes me consider Dune for the first time in my life. . .
Read it, Christine. It's not about spaceships and aliens any more than Moby Dick is about whales.
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