Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

A picaresque tale that creeps up on tragedy

Hundreds of Jews have travelled back recently to the "old countries" of Eastern Europe to try and reconnect with ancestral lives and piece together some of the tragedies we summarise as "the Holocaust". All too often, the past proves elusive: villages no longer exist, sites of massacre have faded into the landscape, surly locals don't want to talk about the war.

To fill this void, many writers have turned the quest itself into books, or created fictional pedigrees as a consolation. Few have approached the baroque, self-conscious exuberance of this astonishing début novel. Jonathan Safran Foer – or an imaginary character of that name – goes to Ukraine to look for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is accompanied by a guide and translator called Alex; Alex's grumpy grandfather; and a lecherous dog known as Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.

One strand of the book consists of Alex's novelised account of their journey, refracted through the stilted English acquired from a thesaurus ("I have a girl who dubs me Currency, because I disseminate so much currency around her. She licks my chops for it"). In parallel, we get chunks from Foer's own novel-in-progress about the lives of his ancestors, from 1791 – when a boat sinks to the bottom of the river Brod and a baby floats to the surface – until the disaster of 1942.

These are described in a fantastical (and rather callous) style, not least in a definitive Book of Antecedents which sums up the shtetl's history in a chronicle of long-forgotten breakfasts, freak storms, sexual taboos, tales of rape, revenge and a couple who divorced and remarried 120 times. One of the central characters, Foer's stump-handed grandfather Safran, acquires "a dirty deck of cards" and attempts each of its sexual positions with 52 different virgins. Yet he derives little satisfaction, and only achieves true ecstasy on his wedding night, just as the Nazis launch an assault on the nearby hills.

The final thread consists of Alex's letters to Foer, about their respective novels and family histories, which raise acute moral issues about the fictionalising of historical atrocity. The different narratives, we begin to realise, are on a collision course. As the Foer saga nears the horrors of the 1940s, we are getting uncomfortable hints about what Alex's grandfather did during the war...

Everything Is Illuminated is a work of formidable talent, yet there seems something oddly perverse about it. Alex's struggles with English are brilliantly sustained, occasionally hilarious and compatible with pathos, without quite overcoming the flavour of music-hall routine. It as if the author had made a bet with himself to try and creep up on an appalling tragedy in the most oblique way – and still break our hearts.

Since he does indeed achieve a shattering climax, one cannot but admire his literary ambition. But are we really so jaded that we can only cope with atrocity when it is spuriously "freshened up", and presented in the voice of the funny foreigner and the whimsical magic realist?

The reviewer is editor of the 'Jewish Quarterly'