Music, novels and misunderstanding

Sometimes there's just so much a person could write about*... but today all I will offer you is a quote from the book “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002). I read the book this week... which means I'm a bit late to it, I suppose, as it's ten years old already (and that means it's already been the hot new book... and the totally cold don't-be-seen-with-it book... as here... so it's probably due for a rebirth around now). I picked it up (from the library... and they only had it in large print... my first time...) mainly because after reading about his later book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (the film of that one being up for Oscar this year) I thought “oh heck, I haven't even read the first one yet!”. But now I have. Cultural honour is preserved.

I'm not going to analyse “Everything is Illuminated” right now (visitors here are intelligent people – read it yourselves... see what you think) but basically, for those of you haven't got to it yet, it is one of those multi-perspectived, keep-you-on-your-toes numbers (we jump about from 1791 to 1941 to the present day on a regular basis... and then also round and round between these and other years... much of it in translated/awkward English). I could further enlighten you by telling you it is a fictional account of a young North American Jewish man's trip to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis... and that the project started life as a real trip of a similar nature (that Safran Foer made from the US to Ukraine in 1999). I should also tell you, I think, that it's not for people who like nice tidy endings to their books (may as well save some of you the time...). However, I certainly thought at least some of it was very good... but you can read other reader responses here and an interview with the author here. I would also point out that the author was in his early twenties when he wrote this first novel and that it's certainly a better piece of work than most of us could have managed at that age (well, me anyway...). How well it will last as the years flick past and the youtube wonders come and go... that's harder to say. It did make me want to try another of Safran Foer's books at least (thinking, for example, how I liked Zadie Smith's 2000 novel “White Teeth” but loved her 2005 best-so-far “On Beauty”).

But anyway... to the quote. “Everything is Illuminated” really has everything – comedy, magical realism, historical horror, a dog, tenderness, lots of shagging – but the passage (ahem) that caught my eye was this section from the novel's “The Book of Antecedents” (a record of everything to do with the fictional Ukrainian shtetl** Trachimbrod, where much of the action takes place, kept by its residents over the years). I suppose I do, in a quiet way, collect quotes about music so here is another one:



"IFACTIFICE
Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish – the most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us, particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word."


It's just a quotation... but there's a fair amount in it. If you want a poem about music instead... handily there's one in my last post.


* Things I could write about include: Gardening (well, someone's got to do it now Mum's gone... see photo above), Bill Hicks (I watched “The Bill Hicks Story” last week), Jane Austen (I also watched, for contrast, “Becoming Jane”... surprisingly enjoyable actually... even if it was hard to think of actress Anne Hathaway as anyone other than herself...), the whole Joseph Kony/ Invisible Children film and responses (here, here and here) issue, that “Make Bradford British” TV programme on recently (white English people... almost impossible to articulate my feelings about some of what they come out with sometimes), the continuing Donald Trump Scottish golf farce (new article here)... and that's before you even get started on Scottish independence matters... trouble-making clergy and about a million other things... good job I've been doing some yoga, that's all I can say...

**Yiddish for small town