Week 29: From the Book of Recurrent Dreams

There is this book that I want to tell everyone about. It’s called Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and it is the one book that truly drove home the saying to ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ for me. Not that it had much of a cover because it was a Penguins Paperback publication (think: orange like Guantanamo Bay), but, by the above saying I mean that the story unraveled into something completely different from what I’d initially expected. It started out as a comedy, a joke, but turned into tragedy at the very end.

It is a story about fate and chance and love and choices given and decisions made and, ultimately, consequences and loss.

Without giving away too much, there are two main arcs in the story: one set in the past and one set in the present trying to discover the past. It is about a young American Jew who journeys to Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. There, he meets a young Ukrainian native and his grandfather, both of whom acts as his translator and guide/driver. After you’ve gone past the first two chapters, there’s no turning back. The characters are extremely sympathetic, past and present, and there’s so much to relate to in the words.

It is possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read. And I’ve decided to put up a few of my favourite passages from the book whenever I feel like it – just so that I may tempt you to give it a chance too.

4: 525 – The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn’t look away. What was that image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backwards to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered – our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.