Everything is illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw the film, and so I read the book, and then, having finished the book, I watched the film again.

The story is funny and sad by turns. The film, which deals with only one dimension of the book starts by being funny, and ends by being sad. Because I’m interested in family history, at the surface level a young man’s search for his family history interests me. Jonathan Safran Foer knows his grandfather came from a village called Trachimbrod in Ukraine, and was saved from the Nazis by a woman called Augustine. Since this is also the name of the author, it seems that he is one of the characters in his own story.

The film deals mainly with the search, while the book deals more with what he found, or what he imagines he found. His guide and translator is Alex, and they are driven around by Alex’s grandfather (who claims to be blind, and has a seeing-eye bitch called Sammy Davis Junior Junior).

From the film: Alex, Jonathan, and Sammy Davis Junior Junior, the See4ing-Eye Bitch

Alex’s English leaves something to be desired, and he seems to have learnt it mainly from books. Finding too many synonyms in English, he fixes on one word, which he uses on all occasions. He picks words for their imagined denotations, regardless of the connotations. When he is angry with people, he “spleens” them, until Jonathan tries to explain that English doesn’t work like that, so Alex substitutes “wrathful” for spleening. He confesses to Jonathan that he has never been carnal with a girl, and is rather distressed to discover that when Jonathan writes the story he writes that his (Jonathan’s) grandfather has been carnal with many women, mainly widows, from an early age.

The story is told from different viewpoints. Alex writes letters to Jonathan, while Jonathan sends him currency for the research he does. Jonathan tries to reconstruct the story of Trachimbrod and its inhabitants. The village was obliterated by the Nazis during the Second World War, and there were very few survivors, one of whom salvaged what she could, and another was Jonathan’s grandfather.

The name of the village does not appear on any map, because it came from an incident when a wagon overturned in a flooded river. The wagon may or may not have belonged to a man named Trachim, who may or may not have drowned when the wagon overturned. A baby, who may or may not have been Trachim’s daughter survived the accident, and the village decided who should bring her up. She was called Brod, and was Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother.

The story that Jonathan reconstructs has a kind of dreamlike quality, and though Trachimbrod was very good at keeping records, many of the records were destroyed when the village itself was destroyed by the Nazis. As they discover more, Alex’s grandfather is forced to confront his own past behaviour during the war.

It is a book about many things, and especially memory, and how we remember and interpret the past and the present in the light of the past.

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Weird dreams

I had a quite extraordinary dream last night, which I wasn’t sure was all a dream.

We were watching TV, and they were showing the discovery of a large alien spaceship. The intrepid spacemen who discovered it knocked on the door, and, on getting no response, tried to break in. Eventually they did that by the expedient of shooting through the doors. This broke airtight seals, and so allowed air to escape.

We remarked at how thick they were to do this, and Jethro, or someone in the film, said there were plenty of other sealed off parts of the ship, so it was only making a small part uninhabitable. At this point we began to enter the film, whether fiction or news, I am not sure. Eventually, after breaking through three or four doors in a long metal corridor, they were trying to film through a glass panel one of the remaining ones, and had a picture of a frightened little boy, about 4 years old, dressed like one of the kids in a 1940s concentration camp, and in black and white, like an old photo.

I never dream in black and white, so I thought I was still watching a film. Then another little boy, a bit older, came round the corner on riding a tricycle, followed by yet another child, and the shooting stopped. Eventually a way was found to open the doors, and make contact with the kids, who turned out to be  human, and there were several others, all black and white, all dressed like they came out of the 1940s. At this point I became aware that I was dreaming, but I was dreaming about a film I had seen on TV.

Then someone came with the news that the spaceship had come from earth — they had explored round the outside of the ship, and discovered it was proudly sponsored by Coca-Cola, and there was an ad for Coke on one side. It appeared that it was a kind of children’s reformatory, except that there was no adult supervision. The children were sent out in the spaceship and abandoned.

At one place there were crosses and symbols in the floor, in a kind of garden, and that was for children who had died. A new one popped up, with an Orthodox cross, and they said that that was because another child somewhere in the ship had died, or was about to die. She was a girl of about 9, a little blonde girl with a bunch of hair on the top of her head tied with a ribbon, again in a 1940s style, in black and white.

We were looking at a photo of her. Then someone discovered a box like a coffin, with a handwritten note in it “Take to Kitt’s” — and it seemed that this was evidence that Kitts were a firm that was used to transfer children to the spaceship.

Then I woke up, still not quite sure if I was dreaming about a film I had actually seen, or whether the whole thing was a dream.

Towards the end several anomalies were becoming apparent. Why were the children dressed as if they were in the 1940s. If they had been sent to the spaceship in the 1940s, why hadn’t they grown up? Were they sentenced to perpetual childhood? The bit about the graves popping up automatically did seem to be inspired by the film of “The hunger games”, or the book.

About 15 years ago there were quite a lot of web sites dedicated to diaries and journals, including online journals that eventually got absorbed into blogs. Some recommended the keeping of “dream diaries“.

I’ve kept a diary on and off since I was 11 years old, and sometimes I’ve recorded dreams in it. About 20 years ago I began keeping my diary on computer, in a database program, and made a field for recording dreams, or such fragments of dreams as I’ve remembered.

From this I’ve concluded that dreams are mostly insignificant. When you use a computer and run lots of different programs, they are supposed to clear the memory used by each program to make that memory available for the next program without the clutter of data from the previous program, and I’ve generally come to think of dreams like this — the brain getting rid of clutter.

The dream I described above seemed different, though. It was a story, one that I first thought was being told in a film, but which I later entered and became part of. Perhaps it could be developed into a kind of science fiction story, and I might do that one day. The illustrations are not what I saw in the dream, of course. They are just to give some idea of the flavour and the period in which the dream was set.

One thing that upsets my theory that dreams are a kind of memory collection and clearing device device is that I have dream locations that recur in several dreams, but are quite different from the actual locations on which they are based. I have a dream Durban and a dream Pretoria, which have a kind of internal consistency, but are quite different from the real world Durban and Pretoria.

 

 

Cheesy dreams

British Cheese Board – News:

The age old myth that cheese gives you nightmares has finally been laid to rest this week following the release of a new study carried out by the British Cheese Board.

The in-depth Cheese & Dreams study, a first of its kind, reveals that eating cheese before bed will not only aid a good night’s sleep but different cheeses will in fact cause different types of dreams.

Of the 200 volunteers who participated in the week-long study, 72% slept well every night, 67% remembered their dreams and none recorded experiencing nightmares after eating a 20g piece of cheese half an hour before going to sleep.

A lot of people still believe the old wives tale that cheese gives you nightmares but this study endorses the scientific facts.

Hat-tip to Matushka Donna.

It makes interesting reading, but I’m still not sure about it. Twenty grammes doesn’t sound like a lot of cheese to me. I find that if I eat pizza too soon before going to bed, it wakes me up, and it is better to give it a chance to digest first. I wonder if they should re-run the experiment with cooked cheese.