Following the debut of his first novel, \Everything is Illuminated,"" Jonathan Safran Foer was swamped with awards and critical acclaim as he watched his book climb to the top of the bestseller lists-in short, everything a new novelist dreams of.
His tale of a young man (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) searching in the Ukraine for the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II won over readers and critics alike with its emotion and humor. Chief among Foer's memorable characters is Alex, the young Ukrainian translator who uses his sprained English to guide the Foer character on his journey.
The Daily Cardinal recently caught up with Jonathan Safran Foer.
Why don't you start out by telling us about your writing and how you got into it?
I was born in D.C. and I spent my whole life there until I went to school. I went to Princeton, studied philosophy. I didn't really have any intentions of being a writer.
I wasn't all that interested in writing at that point in my life. I wasn't the kind of kid who kept a diary or anything like that. In fact, I think it's very, maybe intimidated isn't the right word-I was definitely under the impression that books were somehow smarter than me and if I read a book like ""Middlemarch"" and didn't like it, it was my fault. As if somehow I'm not good enough.
And then, for reasons I'm not quite sure about, I had a change of heart. It may have been the end of high school or the beginning of college when I started to feel like, well, actually maybe it's not my fault and maybe there are books exactly for me if I looked a little bit harder and if there aren't maybe I can try to make a book for me.
And I think it was in that change of attitude and also just recognizing the flexibility of the form of the book. That it's only limited by yourself, really, that I started to get really excited instead of getting intidated.
What got you into writing this particular book?
Well, I made a trip like the trip in the book. I went to the Ukraine for three days and I was looking for a woman who I had been told saved my grandfather during the war. The trip, though, was not at all like what I wrote about. My trip was very much a disappointment. It was full of nothing. And not like an interesting kind of nothing, just a real nothing kind of nothing. And so the book that I wrote wasn't a recounting of the trip-it was a response to it.
What differences do you see between you and your namesake in the book?
Well, it's hard to say because I've-the character in the book remains as he was written and I have changed since then. I think-the circumstances of our lives are quite similar in that we both made these trips, we both came from the same place, we look approximately alike, the same kind of background, but in the book the character is very, very flat. In a way, he's a kind of absence. I hope that I am a little more three-dimensional.
Where did the character of Alex come from?
He came from nowhere in particular. I never met anyone like him. He was really just a fictional creation.
Did you do anything special to get in his mindset to write in his mindset, or did it come very naturally?
I wouldn't say that it came naturally at first... in the sense that in the beginning it was frustrating, a little disorienting and hard and it becomes quite familiar, such that, I think that by the end of the book people say not only could they imitate Alex if they wanted to but it's very hard not to imitate him.
And that's sort of how it was writing him. He came a little bit out of nowhere for me, but within a short amount of time I became very used to him.
Were the three storylines in the novel written at the same time or written separately?
They were written at the same time but very unevenly. I worked on some much more than others and it wasn't until I got into the heavy editing that I sorted them out, in terms of how long each would last, when they would reappear.
Were you still in school at the time or had you finished?
I had written a draft while I was in school and then, you know, kept working on it.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers who want to write their first novel?
Not to listen to too much advice, really. Just do your thing. And the success of the book has nothing to do with whether or not it's published or how many people read it. The way I think about it only the author can evaluate the real success of the book.
What do you enjoy reading? What pieces of literature influenced this novel?
This novel, mostly classical literature like Ovid's ""Metamorphoses,"" Kafka, Shakespeare and then some more recent stuff like Salman Rushdie, Borges.
So are you working on any new projects now?
Another novel ... it's contemporary. It all takes place in a museum and more or less, that's all that I can say.
