John Dugdale
Adventures of an Antic Mind
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Hamish Hamilton 350pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Jonathan Safran Foer’s award-winning debut, Everything Is Illuminated, used humour – centring on the experiences of the character ‘Jonathan Safran Foer’ when visiting Ukraine, and his dealings with a translator speaking an eccentric version of English – as a way to coax the reader towards its eventual subject: the Holocaust, metonymically embodied in the massacre of a Jewish community. Its obvious literary model was Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties