Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Some ground rules: don't look for punctuation. Don't look for meticulously crafted passages. Forget about linear narratives. And most of all, keep your hands inside the car until the ride has come to a complete stop.

Everything is Illuminated is an amazingly complex, clumsy, adorable, frustrating, and most of all moving work of literature. Foer has created a narrative moving in two directions at once. Alexander (Sasha) the co-narrator of the book, discusses present events in a hilariously butchered (and unintentionally deep) English-by-way-of-Ukraine dialect. Foer himself is the other narrator, digging up the past for a winding history of his family. Ultimately, he has traveled to the Ukraine to find the woman who rescued his grandfather from the Nazis. Foer is trying to break free from his past, and Alexander is trying to break free from his future. Barring a miracle, he'll be stuck in the same horrible travel guide job that has sustained his father and grandfather before him.

Foer rockets between the past and the present, from the fantastical formation of a tiny shtetl in Eastern Europe to the birth of his great great etc relatives, to the present, where Alex reviews history as Foer writes it and offers suggestions for improvement. While Alex slowly comes to grips with the fact that any truly human story is inherently unhappy, Foer comes to realize that the world is not as dark a place as he'd like it to be.

Some of the best humor in the book comes from the clash of cultures. There's American pop culture as Alex's second language ("For an example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal.") or American culture as the object of ridicule (see the vegan discussion in the chapter "Going Forth to Lutsk").

Foer grinds gears from the comic to the maudlin to the harrowing ("What We Saw When We Saw Trachimbrod") with reckless abandon. It can be difficult to keep up with him, but in the end, you'll be happy you took the ride. All of the stories loose ends are tied up nicely at the end, and indeed, everything is illuminated, whether it's shedding light on a mystery or revealing those aspects of humanity we'd rather ignore.