John Dugdale

Adventures of an Antic Mind

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

By

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. 

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