Rating: 
Summary: A TERRIFIC FIND
Review: A friend told me about this book and I will always be grateful--what a find! I listened to the audio version and ran the gamut of emotional reactions during the course of this heartbreaking and hilarious novel. I never knew the English language could be butchered in so many creative ways! the dual narrative, one going forward in time, one going backward, was a bit confusing at times, but ultimately, it worked. I look forward to m ore of Foer's work.
Rating: 
Summary: A premium book
Review: "Everything is Illuminated" is a remarkable, erratically brilliant book. Despite its flaws, it is one of the most adventurous, funniest, and most moving books IÕve read lately.The novel weaves three strands together in an intricate mesh of ÔfactÕ and fantasy. The first is the novel-within-a-novel written by the character Jonathan Safran Foer, a fictionalized and fantastic history of FoerÕs ancestors and the Ukrainian village of Trachimbod that ranges from the 18th century up to the villageÕs destruction by the Nazis in 1942. The second is narrated by FoerÕs ersatz Ukrainian translator Alex Perchov, who recounts their search for Trachimbod in hilariously mangled English. The last strand consists of AlexÕs letters to Jonathan, written as the two young men trade chapters of their narratives back and forth. This is a complex, ambitous novel that never lets its technical fireworks detract from an exploration of memory and identity that is warm, immediate, and deeply felt. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly good
Review: I'm simply amazed to read reviewers trashing this book so dismissively. They aren't exactly the most articulate criticisms. For one, the book is funny. This isn't one of those "brilliantly imagined" novels that spends pages upon pages describing a meadow, or a field, or whatever, to show off the author's expertise with adjectives and "challenging" metaphors. The pages of conversation between Jonathon and Alex are just hilarious. Second, the storytelling is clear, well-paced, and well-rendered. The book never plods - it's not even particularly long. The images are stark and haunting (a simple white string becomes an enduring image of the story, for example). Finally (and this must doom it on Amazon[.com]) it's full of subtleties - about characters, images, and even major plot elements. But the subtleties work on a level that doesn't interfere with the (compelling) story. You don't need a course in literary criticism or jewish history to enjoy the book, though I'm sure it would enrich the understanding (I have no doubt that I missed plenty of the jewish references, in fact). The title is ironic: everything is not illuminated - much of the story is in the dark, possibly imagined, largely uncertain; while the phrase is one of Alex's, with his secondhand English, the reference is nothing less than Genesis -God's creation of the universe, "let there be light." Yep, that kind of book. The big themes: God, Love, Uncertainty, Imagination. And, for good measure, the writer's place in relation to the above big themes (the author here even bearing the same name as one of the characters in the book - though he's not "the hero" as Alex dubs him). Books like this are full of pitfalls, just waiting to become bad caricatures of themselves (See: Prague). This one succeeds handily. Wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant book
Review: This is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. I hesitated buying the book for a long time, scared off by all the buzz. But a friend gave it to me for the holidays. Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard reading a work of fiction. But the amazing this is that these are not cheap laughs. The book is significant, deep, a real challange: emotionally, intellectually, and artistically. This is a real work of literature that is also incredibly entertaining. All the more amazing when you think about how young the author is. I will certainly be looking forward to whatever he writes next. This is a wonderful read on so many levels. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: The Textbook Definition of Overrated
Review: Jonathon Saffron Flowerhead (or whatever his name is) is this year's version of Junot Diaz--a marginal talent with major marketing bucks behind him and a few New Yorker editors in his pocket. That's all. Don't waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Mildly Humorous, Vastly Overrated
Review: I'm sorry, I just didn't get it.
This book was sold hard, and reviewed very well, and being a fan of modern literature I bought into the hype.
The "parallel writing" gimmicks are cute for about the first 50 pages.
The fractured use of the English language grows weary after about 100 pages.
The ending is about as unfulfilling as any book which I have read in the last ten years.
Maybe you need to relate to this story on a different level (as a foreigner, as a traveler having a unique experience with a guide, as a relative desperate for family tree information) in order to enjoy "Everything Is Illuminated". I came into the story as neither.
I sold this book as soon as I finished it, and used the money to buy "Prague".
Rating:
Summary: Truly incandescent
Review: I read the last page at 2AM with a sigh (of both profound admiration and weariness at the tumult of this journey), and had the impulse to begin the book again immediately. Like the "hero" of the story, I was desperate to examine the connections between things, create closure, solve mysteries. If I simply paid proper attention the second time around, I thought, everything would be--as the title promised--illuminated for me. Upon reflection, part of the novel's genius is in the absence of such things; revelations are made in the negative spaces that exist between truths and half-or "not-truths" (as Alex the translator calls them), like the character who exists within the hole in a wall that separates herself from her invalid husband.
Too much has been irrevocably destroyed, or concealed in regret and grief, to ever fully trace or define one's history and identity.The themes are universal, but especially poignant within a Holocaust narrative. The power and elasticity of memory and imagination in the face of unspeakable loss is at the core of the novel. Ostensibly searching the decimated Ukrainian landscape for an old woman who saved the "hero"'s grandfather from the Nazis, each of the characters is on their own quest for truth, love, and meaning. I advise a reader to not approach this as a cut-and-dried mystery story, which would likely leave one disappointed, but to savor the rich details Foer offers. Complex, ambitious, thoughtful, witty, filled with longing, exquisitely written--a remarkable achievement. Foer, by virtue of his astonishing youth (he's 25 or 26), seems to have become contemporary literature's "It" writer of the moment, with all of the exaltation and derision therein. The snide ones characteristically focus less on the work and more on the alleged hubris of the literary wunderkind. Just believe the hype--this is a strange and wondrous odyssey.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting way of telling a story
Review: I loved this story. It is a little tough to get through at first but once you understand what is going on you can't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. I felt like I could relate to it better than any other book I've read recently. A very interesting and unique style of writing allows this book to go places to reach its readers that other books are unable to do. After the first 40 or 50 pages I really wasn't that into it yet, but I kept reading and quickly got hooked. I think I read the last 100 pages in one sitting.
Rating:
Summary: Average Good Simple Book
Review: A good debut novel, but lacking in substance.
Hopefully the writer will gain much needed confidence in his
next attempt a literary nirvana.
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