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  • Creative and Heartbreaking

  • I've never read a book that is told in such a unique manner! Foer uses numerous character POV's that span hundreds of years to tell this story within a story. My favorite parts were the letters from Alex, who is such an enigmatic character. He steals the spotlight in my opinion! He's the comic relie ... Continue

    I've never read a book that is told in such a unique manner! Foer uses numerous character POV's that span hundreds of years to tell this story within a story. My favorite parts were the letters from Alex, who is such an enigmatic character. He steals the spotlight in my opinion! He's the comic relief, the voice of the reader responding to Jonathan's story about his relatives. The lives of Jonathan's ancestors are the sad, introspective, and overly dramatized parts of the book. The reader is shown human nature in its most raw form. Parts of the book are shocking and disturbing, but it's truthful and that is what gives this story such power.

    

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• ― MoirneStark said on Jul 4, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

By turns comic and tragic, but always passionate, wildly inventive, and touched with an indelible humanity, this debut novel is a powerful, deeply felt story of searching: for the past, family, and truth.

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• fictionMy favoritesContemporaryLiterarypastukraineholocausthumorcontemporary fictionhysterical realism
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