As someone who loves the physical experience of reading a book - the heft of the book, the feel of the pages, the art of the cover, the choice of font and layout - my encounter with audio books has been relatively limited. I know there's an art form to giving voices to characters and losing yourself in the lost art of vocal storytelling, but I really like to visually read stories. But there was one summer during grad school that I absolutely needed an audio book, and that is the first time I encountered the work of Jonathan Safran Foer. (Hint hint - he's favorite writer number three!)
I was working at Vanderbilt's Central Library one summer, and as summers aren't usually the busiest time for circulation desk employees, I was assigned to a special project. The old periodicals had been labeled with stickers sometime in the mid-18th century, and they were pretty much falling to pieces. They were faded, the adhesive was patchy at best, and the stickers were cracked and peeling off. I had to use a pointed nail file to scrape off the old labels, remove all remaining bits of adhesive from the spine, and place a new label and clear cover on each volume. Oh, it's about as fun as it sounds. My hands were raw from grabbing the sharp edges of the nail file, I had bits of sticky plastic all over my hands, arms, clothes, and even face, and I very quickly grew tired of listening to music to pass the time (I was already bored spitless, so much so that the music served to lull me to sleep more than keep me interested).
Our library carried a small handful of Playaways, which were audiobooks self-contained in a small handheld playing device. As soon as I realized that listening to one of these wouldn't require me to find and carry around a huge Discman, I began scouring the shelves for something I was excited about reading. My eyes fell on Everything is Illuminated, Foer's first full-length novel. By this time, the film version had already been produced, so I had heard of the title and remembered several friends recommending it as a good story. Little did I know that when I put those totally unsanitary library headphones into my ears for the first time that I would be transported to a different world - well, actually, two different worlds.
Everything is Illuminated has a dual narrative structure - which is so tricky to try to explain but so easy to get lost in. The protagonist is named Jonathan Safran Foer, and he is an author. The main plot of the story centers around Jonathan's trip to Ukraine to track down his own family history. He hires a tour guide - Alex - whose family business is to help American Jews find out what happened to their relatives during the Holocaust. Though Jonathan is the main character, Alex is the narrator - the perfect role to showcase his thesaurus-heavy method of learning English. I haven't laughed so hard in a library... maybe ever.
The other half of the story is character-Jonathan's manuscript that he is writing to tell of his family's history. His lyrical, fantasy-ridden style is vastly different from Alex's malapropisms and intense desire to be a cool guy. The two narratives strike a real sense of rhythm with each other - balancing each other, playing off each other, enhancing and heightening and illuminating the other.
I also can't remember another time I cried in a library. As is to be expected with literature featuring the events of the Holocaust, the drama of the story was powerful and intense. I have to give Foer credit - it's this story that sparked my interest in generational identity, in finding oneself in stories - real or imagined, but always true - that tell about where we came from, who our loved ones are, and what holds us all together.
Foer's other works - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals - are also amazing, and I could write tons about each of them. But I will never forget listening to Everything is Illuminated sitting on a dirty stepstool, with glue all over my hands and tears streaming down my cheeks.
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