GroshLink

I took some time to browse the additional scenes from Everything is Illuminated. Good editing (or just deletions) as I might have stopped watching the film after The Collector scene and the inappropriate sexual material was more than I could have taken. I guess according to the film, life goes back and forth between the play and life itself. I agree that we must have perspective on life, but we must set ourselves in the larger story instead of making up our own ways of navigating reality. See the author's perspective below:

I did not intend to write EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. I intended to chronicle, in strictly nonfictional terms, a trip that I made to the Ukraine as a twenty-year-old. Armed with a photograph of the woman who I was told had saved my grandfather from the Nazis. I embarked on a journey to Trachimbrod, the shtetl of my family's origin. The comedy of errors lasted five days. I found nothing but nothing, and in that nothing -- a landscape of completely realized absence -- nothing was to be found. Because I didn't tell my grandmother about the trip -- she would have never let me go I didn't know what questions to ask, or whom to ask, or the necessary names of people, places and things. The nothing was as much a result of me as what I encountered. I returned to Prague, where I had planned to write the story of what had happened.

But what had happened? It took me a week to finish the first sentence. In the remaining month I wrote 280 pages. What made beginning so difficult, and the remainder so seemingly automatic, was imagination -- the initial problem, and ultimate liberation, of imagining. My mind wanted to wander, to invent, to use what I had seen as a canvas, rather than the paints. But, I wondered, is the Holocaust exactly that which cannot be imagined? What are one's responsibilities to "the truth" of a story, and what is "the truth"? Can historical accuracy be replaced with imaginative accuracy? The eye with the mind's eye?

The novel's two voices -- one "realistic," the other "folkloric" -- and their movement toward one another, has to do with this problem of imagination. The Holocaust presents a real moral quandry for the artist. Is one allowed to be funny? Is one allowed to attempt verisimilitude? To forego it? What are the moral implications of quaintness? Of wit? Of sentimentality? What, if anything, is untouchable?

With the two very different voices, I attempted to show the rift that I experienced when trying to imagine the book. (It is the most explicit of many rifts in the book.) And with their development toward each other, I attempted to heal the rift, or wound.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED proposes the possibility of a responsible duality, of "did and didn't," of things being one way and also the opposite way. Rather than aligning itself with either "how things were" or "how things could have been," the novel measures the difference between the two, and by so doing, attempts to reflect the way things feel.

I know that's a long, but it's good have it in his own words.