Word: foer
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...some point in the past year, people asked themselves the question, When is it O.K. to stop crying and start laughing again? Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin; 276 pages), is a very funny book about very tragic times, and it's just a little bit nervous about being so funny. After one comic aside, the narrator--a Ukrainian would-be hipster (and remedial English student) named Alexander Perchov--feels as if he has to reassure his audience: "It was not wrong to make a funny here. It was the right thing...
Everything Is Illuminated is written as a duet for two voices. One belongs to Jonathan Safran Foer (or his fictional alter ego of the same name), who relates the history of Trachimbrod, the East European village where his ancestors lived. Trachimbrod is a lyrical, fairy-tale creation, a Yiddish idyll of the Fiddler on the Roof variety, inhabited by randy, gossipy villagers like Bitzl Bitzl the gefilte-fish monger, and the melancholy maiden Brod, the narrator's great-to-the-fifth grandmother, who precociously enumerates 613 varieties of sadness by the time she's 12 years...
...Christie's surrender of information bought it conditional amnesty, but Sotheby's, slower off the mark, will get none. "The idea of the program is to get the first guy to break," notes Albert A. Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute in Washington. Although Christie's may be off the hook, "Sotheby's could be required to pay a penalty. Some people could go to jail...