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Literature allows you the luxury of digging deep into the lives of others without getting your hands dirty. It lets you vicariously experience events of the past, the lives of others far removed from yourself, while keeping a safe distance from the risks of actual emotional involvement. It's a one-way mirror that lets you peer unguardedly at a person, study him, gawk at him, emphathize with him, hate him, feel with him.

Jonathan Safran Foer, in his novel, Everything is Illuminated, breaks the one way mirror in his tale of life in a Ukrainian Jewish shtetl, and the end of all that life. He robs you of your right to experience the atrocities from a distance. You can't coolly view the plight of the characters, far removed from their lives. You're right there, shell-shocked. You're forced to gaze disbelieving at the raw brutality of a world where entire towns can be wiped off the map.

Fiction, or at least good fiction, is reality compressed. You get what is sometimes sometimes a lifetime's worth of illumination put into one work and see some aspect man in general, of a man in particular, of yourself in particular, or of the world in which you live. You in turn are illuminated, you understand what you didn't before. (Chances are, you probably won't get that with the pulp novels they sell at WalMart.)

Foer paints his portrait of reality in detail that is simultaneously raw, painful, lovely, insane, hilarious, and dirty. He takes you by the back of the neck and shoves your face right into his painting, forcing you to behold the world's chiaroscuro of unfathomable beauty and raw evil.

The story, a mixture of creative fiction and autiobiography, unfolds as Foer treks across Ukraine in search of the woman who helped save his Jewish grandfather from the Nazis. He is accompanied by a linguistically inept translator, a grouchy and profane old driver, and a flatulent deranged dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

The plot is revealed in letters between Foer and his translator, each of whom is also writing a separate narrative. Foer's freewheeling history is at once imaginative and mimetic, a mixture of fantasy and photographic realism. Be sure that you keep handy a box of tissues and a punching bag.

Now for some reviews by others:

Philadelphia Inquirer : "A rambunctious tour de force of inventive and intelligent storytelling . . . Foer can place his reader's hand on the heart of human experience, the transcendent beauty of human connections. Read, you can feel the life beating."

Kirkus Reviews: "Comedy and pathos are braided together with extraordinary skill in a haunting debut. . .riveting intensity and originality."

Time Magazine: "A certified wunderkind at 25 . . .a funny, moving...deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible."