Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel made him the darling and the whipping boy of the literary world. Brilliant and pretentious, and at times completely impenetrable, the book chronicled the adventures of a geekish young collector of family ephemera named Jonathan Safran Foer (pure coincidence, of course) who travels through the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II. Guided only with a photograph and a companionable if bizarre translator, the miserable Foer blunders along doggedly, bothering everyone in his path and picking up new doodads for his collection–items valuable only to him, which are displayed in plastic bags covering a monumental wall. Elijah Wood borrows Harry Potter’s glasses to play Foer, making him look like more of an artifact than anything he encounters in the Old World.
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