As every one of my seminar professors and all of my book group co-members (two groups with a non-zero overlap!) can attest, I can be a bit of a disappointment in a discussion. Don’t get me wrong, I read the book, show up mostly on time, come with notes, listen attentively, and speak up. I ask questions of the group, build on what others have said, and occasionally see unusual connections and have original insights.
Okay, “disappointment” might be a strong word. I’m probably not a C-, more like a B+. Taking Bloom’s Taxonomy (revised 2001), I crush Remember, Understand, and Apply. It’s the Analyze, Evaluate and Create part that’s the problem.
That’s where “Say More” comes in. After writing the post for Everything Is Illuminated in my usual fashion, I could hear echoes of “Say More!” from encouraging former professors and baffled book group members, as well as actual Off The Shelf blog readers (you do exist!) and, I suppose most importantly, my own inner critic.
“Say more about why these connections are interesting or relevant.”
“Say more about what the book’s moments mean to you.”
“Say more about what actually happens in the book.”
None of that sounds like any fun to write, but I’m going to dip my toe in just a bit and give it a try. So here goes…
…in a roundabout way…
My cousin and I hired a service to investigate our family origins in Japan. Japanese family records (koseki) are held locally in the town/city hall of their honseki, or ancestral home, and are in no way searchable on Ancestry.com. Also, neither of us reads Japanese, much to the dishonor of said ancestors.
We had a Zoom call with Sean at Japan Genealogy Connect and have followed up with emails and document sharing platforms and now we know the correct spelling of our last name and that our grandfather had five siblings, not just the two we knew about. Next steps: find the koseki for our grandmother’s side and see if we can locate even more cousins!
At no point in this process did we have to share a car with an interpreter who speaks in fluent thesaurus, a blind driver, and a drooling, biting, amorous, farting dog. Everything Is Illuminated is set in 1791 and 1942 and 1997, and in none of those dates would an online genealogy search or a Zoom call have been an option. Instead the self-inserted author (JSF) flies to Ukraine with a photograph, some fraying documents, and no clue how to find either his own “honseki” or the person in the photograph, who he believes saved his grandfather in 1941.
So, after:
- one 35-minute call,
- a few weeks’ wait, and
- a quick search for my OneNote login,
I got:
- 16 pages of family history going back six generations,
- a handy reading guide, and
- an easy-to-read graphic family tree (and you know how much I like a graphic organizer)
On the other hand, after days of:
- driving around for hours with the aforementioned impossible entourage
- being denied food because he was a vegetarian
- getting charged extra because he was an American
- having the dog eat most of his irreplaceable family documents
JSF ended up:
- meeting one deeply damaged survivor who remembered his grandfather
- learning the terrible story of the town, and
- developing a personal and also collaborative relationship with the interpreter, Alex.
And though ultimately he came away with little more insight into his family history and many more questions, loose ends, and failures, he did write this prize-winning novel.
Characteristically, I got the Remember/Understand experience; JSF had the Evaluate/Create version.
For one last stab at a higher Bloom’s Taxonomy grade, let’s talk for a minute about voice.
In my original post, I compared Everything Is Illuminated to Junie B. Jones. For those of you who don’t know, my beef with Junie B. Jones is that the books are unapologetically and completely written in her voice (*gasp* who would do such a thing?), and her voice breaks all the rules (except where it incorrectly doesn’t). I wouldn’t let my kids read them because I thought they would confuse emerging language learners with phrases like “I runned” and “more beautifuller.”
I had a similar knee-jerk response to Alex’s deliberately unconventional voice. Not that I thought readers of Everything Is Illuminated were likely to start saying things like “disseminate so much currency” when they mean “spend so much money” or “flaccid-to-utter” for “easy-to-say.” Even so, it took me a long while (and some help from the audiobook narrator) to get to a place where I could begin to appreciate what the voice was trying to do.
Turns out it wasn’t trying to confuse or annoy me into giving up on the book in the first few pages. It wasn’t trying to make me think that JSF is a xenophobe and wants to make non-English speakers look stupid. It wasn’t even trying to perversely grow my vocabulary (even though it did).
The voice (as well as the descriptions, characters, structure, plot — yup, the whole book) seemed determined to make me uncomfortable. As a lifelong avoider of cringe media, I might not be the best person to say anything original about the role of discomfort in these modern times.
I can, however, tell you that the graphic descriptions of the physically excruciating car trips, the synonym speed bumps in Alex’s letters, the comically difficult lives and terrible choices across multiple time periods, and the uncertainty and loose threads left for the reader to navigate, all resulted in a huge sense of relief in me when even one tiny thing would go right or one little question would get answered.
Is this why people like The Office or Parks and Rec? Are there subtle depths of the human experience for me to plumb out there if I can just wade through the thorns? Or have I completely missed the point?
Let me know.
There. I’ve Said More! Now where are my confetti cannons? You don’t think I did all this for an internal sense of accomplishment?
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