Mini-Review of “Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer

As I mentioned last month, my friend, Andy Peix, turned me on to the idiosyncratic writing style of Jonathan Safran Foer. Having been moved by “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I knew I had to dig deep and read his first novel, “Everything is Illuminated.”

Foer has a gift for taking huge tragedies – 9/11 or the Holocaust – and distilling the horror of their aftermath into very personal journeys taken by quirky and unforgettable characters. In this case, the protagonist – a fictional Jonathan Safran Foer – sets out on a journey to find a gentile woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The fractured English of Alex, the young Ukrainian translator, highlights the absurdity of many of the situations that Alex and Jonathan find themselves in – accompanied by the ever-drooling and randy canine with the greatest name in all of literature: “Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior”!

The writing is brilliant; the characters are memorable; the story is moving. Read it.

Enjoy.

Al

Alert to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Users - Saving Word Documents

A word to the wise. As a recruiter, I receive hundreds of resumes as e-mail attachments. I prefer to receive them in MS-Word format. The problem is that when users of the Microsoft Vista operating system or Microsoft Office Word 2007 save a Word document, it is saved by default as a .docx file, which cannot be opened or read by Windows XP. So, unless you know that the person you are sending a Word file to has Vista or Microsoft Office 2007, please save your document as a .doc file rather than a .docx.

Thanks.

Al