Word: foer
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...pencil.) Jordan had made 13 trips over 12 years to lobby Iraqi officials for interviews, and the line between protecting employees and sucking up is blurry--though, he noted, CNN covered Iraq contentiously enough that its reporters were often kicked out. But, as the New Republic's Franklin Foer points out, CNN also called Saddam's re-election with 100% of the vote a "huge show of support" and a "vote of defiance against the United States...
...pencil.) Jordan had made 13 trips over 12 years to lobby Iraqi officials for interviews, and the line between protecting employees and sucking up is blurry - though, he noted, CNN covered Iraq contentiously enough that its reporters were often kicked out. But, as the New Republic's Franklin Foer points out, CNN also called Saddam's re-election with 100% of the vote a "huge show of support" and a "vote of defiance against the United States...
...Perchov, the novel's other, more successfully realized narrator, tells a very different tale. He acts as a translator when Foer takes a trip to Ukraine. Bluff, gruff and unflappable, he writes in broken English: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." (His English gets better?and less hilarious?as the book goes on.) Accompanied by Perchov's narcoleptic grandfather and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Foer and Perchov set off into the Ukrainian countryside to search for what's left of present-day Trachimbrod...
...Alternating chapters, the two voices come at the plot from both ends at once, Foer moving forward in time through Trachimbrod's history and Perchov searching backward for traces of it. They also share themes: the maddening bonds of family, the power of memory and the importance of lies and jokes. "I present not-truths in order to protect you," Perchov tells his charge. "That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person." The two stories collide when the searchers stumble on Trachimbrod's last surviving inhabitant, who tells the horrifying secret of how the dreamy...
...certified wunderkind at 25, Foer spares no expense with his typographical special effects?italics, capital letters, parentheses within parentheses, onomatopoeia, song lyrics and encyclopedia entries?and the book comes laden with bloated blurbs ("He will win your admiration, and he will break your heart," croons Joyce Carol Oates), but don't let that distract you. Under it all there's a funny, moving, unsteady, deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible. As Perchov would say, it's the right thing...