Or deader perhaps, for then he was at least a bullet in his father’s cock.” Hmmmm. We get bits and pieces of Jonathan Safran Foer’s future masterpiece, which I assume our direct quotes from the novel: “Dead as before his parents met. We could call it a literary case of circular reasoning, but it feels more like circular insistence, or wish fulfillment, or simply quite suspect. In other words, the greatness of what we’re witnessing as we watch the play. On a simple level, Block and Jonathan Safran Foer never miss the opportunity to let us know that even though the character Jonathan Safran Foer is a writer in the making in Everything is Illuminated, the book Everything is Illuminated and by extension the play Everything is Illuminated is actually the proof of his future greatness. You feel it in the forced nature of the writing, the way it wants to bully you into acknowledging the importance of what you’re witnessing. What we get here though is neither misty-eyed nostalgia nor brutal takedowns, but an innervating mixture of unrealistic, sitcom quirks and a child’s notion of moral reckoning. If this were a vicious satire of a narcissistic American crippled by notions of fame and his own importance, then you couldn’t ask for a more telling set up-it’s the type of tale the young Evelyn Waugh got a kick out of before he went soft and wrote Brideshead Revisted, kissing the hand he used to gleefully bite. Or at least the novel Everything is Illuminated. Oh, and one more thing: while Jonathan Safran Foer is searching for the mysterious woman to whom he owes his life, he will turn his Ukraine journey, his goofy-cute Ukrainian guides, the whole of his family’s tortured history, Judaism, sub-literate Eastern Europeans, and the Holocaust into a great piece of literature. Not to mention big-breasted waitresses, hostile innkeepers, and, well, anything foreign. And Eastern Europeans with their funny accents and violent ways, well, they’re inherently wacky. And the dog might be attracted to Jonathan Safran Foer, so that’s wacky, too. You know it’s supposed to be wacky when you learn that Alex and his Grandfather’s horny dog is called Sammy Davis Jr. There, his guide and translator, Alex, whose English isn’t up to UN standards, and Alex’s Grandfather, the only driver among them and perhaps blind, take Jonathan Safran Foer on one of those wacky cross-country journeys that only happen in novels, movies, and plays. The story is as American as you can get: Jonathan Safran Foer, the character not the author, takes a trip to the Ukraine to try to find the woman who saved his Grandfather from the Nazis and to thank her for his existence. The whole enterprise is what we might call anxious for significance.
There’s something distasteful about rank ambition and its stench is all over the Aurora Theatre’s production of Simon Block’s stage adaption of Jonathan Safran Foer’s kind-of-celebrated, first novel, Everything is Illuminated.
0 kommentar(er)
