You will have to ignore everything you read about this novel. For you will read that Everything Is Illuminated is a work of genius, that its author, at 24, has staked his claim for literary greatness, that it’s a new kind of novel, that after it things will never be the same again. You won’t believe it and you’ll decide not to read the book on principle. And that would be a disaster, because it’s all true.

The book contains a story about a young American Jew called Jonathan Safran Foer, who travels to Ukraine in search of the woman he believes saved his father from the Nazis in 1943. The story is not written by Foer, however. It is written by Alex, the 20-year-old Ukrainian translator Jonathan has hired, whose blind grandfather does the driving and whose randy dog, named Sammy Davis Junior Junior, shares the backseat with Jonathan as they head off to find a quiet rural spot where, not all that long ago, all the Jews were rounded up and burnt.

Alex’s prose has a quirkiness derived from his ownership of a thesaurus but no dictionary: “I was sired in 1977,” he tells us, “I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa.” The technique feels clumsy at first, but soon brings new levels of linguistic fun to the David Copperfield routine.

Indeed, the book’s linguistic ingenuity has led to comparisons with A Clockwork Orange. But its author has the advantage of not being a 45-year-old academic who was never even young in the first place. Foer, on the other hand, wrote this book when he was 20 — he is not an enfant terrible, he is an enfant who can really, really write.

And what the Jonathan Safran Foer inside this novel writes, in the gaps between chapters of Alex’s story, is the history of an imaginary Ukranian shtetl called Trachimbrod, from its birth in 1791 to its death in the 1940s. As the Trachimbrod story travels forwards to its tragic conclusion (written as comedy but with the grim dramatic irony generated by our knowledge of its doom) Alex’s story travels in the other direction, back towards 1943, where the two narratives will meet, and reveal, perhaps, what his grandfather did or did not do in the war.

Letters between Alex and Jonathan written after the trip and books written by inhabitants of Trachimbrod crowd for our attention. The competing narratives cry for attention in a darkness that is historical, spiritual and moral.

If the novel gets a muted reception in Britain, it will be because the domestic literary establishment, by comparison with the American, is not particularly interested in the Holocaust anymore, nor so enthusiastic about the novel of Jewish self-discovery. That would be a shame, because Jewishness performs the narrative function here that Catholicism and pre-Christian myth did in One Hundred Years of Solitude, illuminating the tension between reality and illusion, history and fiction, past and present. As in Márquez’s masterpiece, the destruction of the village is foretold in a book within the book, and as it is read so the prophesy comes true, and its physical form blows through the village like the wind that blew through Macondo, blowing away homes, people, histories, all hope and, ultimately, the story itself. It will blow you away too. Trust me.

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