kicked in the heart

this is just a short update post... i just finished "everything is illuminated" this afternoon. i finished it on my afternoon break. my boss had to ask me if i needed to take a minute. no tears, but whoa... kicked in the heart. really a quite beautiful book. maybe understated. i'm gonna have to read it again. so so much in it. and then it was over. whoa. everybody should read it...maybe...it's sadder than it is funny...a very pretty kind of sadness...
there are really only three characters - the "hero", jonathan safran foer (same name as author...), his translator alex/sasha, alex's grandfather who is also the driver, and sammy davis junior junior, grandpa's dog. it's about a guy who goes to the ukraine to try to find a woman who may have helped his grandfather escape the nazis, but jsf only has a photo to go by. alex and grandfather are kinda last minute translator/driver, but alex's english kinda funny, and the funny-ness brings really funny translations and really interesting and important and stupidly eloquent layers of meaning to the story. grandfather kinda breaks my heart for the whole book... actually i don't want to say anymore. i loved this book so much, it's hard to comprehend how the author did what he did with what he did...

enough. now i'm starting "the historian" by elizabeth kostovo. historical fiction spanning centuries of eastern european history, centering around the carpathian mountains...anybody's spidey-sense tingling? it's about dracula...but i feel obliged to say that this is more like literature...it got a really good review in the star a week or so ago (hence the number of customers coming into the store asking "where's that book that was in the star...i dunno...last weekend or maybe the one before that...?" as if there was only one book in the star...actually they haven't been too bad for this book. they've all remembered the title for one thing. not just the colour of the cover. ) so far so good, and it's like a 1000 pages so it should last me all week.