Jonathan Safran Foer arrived at the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport the Sunday morning after the Virginia Festival of the Book, casually dressed in jeans and a gray button-toothed coat. As it turned out, the airport, with planes flying into the distance and arrival and destination announcements weaving in and out of the interview, was very much an appropriate backdrop as the author discussed where he had been in the past and where he would like to go in the future.
In person, Foer is frailer than one might imagine -- a characteristic which, coupled with an exceedingly polite and calm demeanor, may belie his easy verbosity. He speaks carefully with each syllable of his words dropping quietly with a slight lilt in his voice.
"[Writing] is the hardest thing that I do," Foer said. "But that is not a problem. There's no reason to assume that just because it's incredibly painful that you need to relieve that pain."
Foer was just one of the many authors who attended the annual Virginia Festival of the Book held at the University and in Charlottesville last weekend.
One of the young author's appearances at the festival included a Saturday afternoon reading at Barnes & Noble entitled "Odysseys, Illumination, and Forbidden Tales: Three Jewish Novelists," at which he spoke along with novelists Pearl Abraham and Steve Stern. Foer followed the reading by another performance in the evening with writer Esmeralda Santiago at Culbreth Theatre in "The Self and the Story: A Headline Event."
But just five years ago, Foer, now 28, was answering telephones as a receptionist in an office. He lived in a shoebox-sized apartment in Queens, N.Y. and was single.
Today, Foer is the author of two published books, occupies a three-story limestone townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, N.Y. and is married to fellow writer Nicole Krauss. His debut book, "Everything is Illuminated," has been translated into 26 languages and currently is being adapted for the big screen by Liev Schreiber and will star Elijah Wood. The movie is scheduled for release this August.
"Everything that had happened since then has surprised me incredibly much," Foer said. "I've been in awe of everything, it's incredible. It's not what I expected, and it's not even what I really wanted."
Despite his remarkable success, Foer insisted that his initial intentions were fairly simple.
"I wanted to try to write a book," Foer said, emphasizing that success should not be marked by fame or money but rather how the book is perceived by the reader and author.
"Don't equate success in a world with the success of a book," he warned. "My book was really widely rejected by agents and publishers, and it was the exact same book that was then successful. So you don't need any more evidence than that."
Foer had started writing "Everything is Illuminated" during his sophomore year at Princeton University and completed a draft of it as his undergraduate creative writing thesis with award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates as his mentor. The story follows a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer as he embarks on an excursion to a shtetl in Ukraine in order to find the woman who he understands to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
When it was published in 2002, the book and its author found themselves in the middle of a media storm. The public deemed Foer a surrealist and labeled him a "hip lit" boy -- if there can be such a genre -- for his unconventional use of words and language within the text. For example, chunks of the book are devoted to purely scripted dialogue, or the structuring of words on a page so that they create a line of waves.
Unconventional use of visual elements turned out to be a trademark characteristic of Foer's, who admitted that he sees words simply as the vehicle in which he can effectively express himself. His short story, "A Primer for the Punctuation of a Heart-Disease," sketches the unique and often unspoken communication among family members through the use of symbols such as the question mark, square, smiley face, and at more perilous times, the upside down exclamation point, in place of words.
In his sophomore novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Foer plays with word arrangement and typography and leaves pages blank in the middle of the book. Words are corrected in bright red ink as they may have been in the "real life" of the characters, and photographs are interspersed throughout the text.
"I think what I want to do is to bring more things into books. Books are really what I like the best," Foer said.
At the Barnes & Noble reading, Foer questioned literary content and the boundaries of the perceived notion of "literature." He referred to the disdain of some literary critics, who are quick to label Foer as "experimental" or gimmicky.
In front of an audience, Foer is quiet unless engaged, and is highly personable, quick to quip jokes. Before reading an excerpt of "Everything is Illuminated," Foer gave the audience the analogy of feeling like he had gone through the process of giving a three-year birth to his most recent novel, only to introduce the older first-born in its place.
The writer flailed his arms in the air and mocked, "It's a boy!It's a girl!"
In "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Foer has absorbed his New York City surroundings and the trauma of Sept. 11 and funneled them into the perspective of a nine-year-old boy, Oskar, whose father has been killed in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Oskar, named after the protagonist in Günther Grass's "Tin Drum," sets out on a journey through the City's five boroughs to find a man named "Black," the name that Oskar's father had written on an envelope. The latter contains a key that the young boy believes will help him solve the mystery of his father's death.
"My book is largely about war ... what happens after an act of war," Foer said of his sophomore book.
"Politicians tend to talk, answer questions with abstractions and generalizations and of these capital-letter words, like capital 'A' America, capital 'J' Justice, capital 'T' Terrorism," Foer said. "In a novel, you can be very specific and talk in lower
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