Rating: 
Summary: Wildly over-rated and over-hyped
Review: Reviewers go nuts over debut authors, especially if they're young and attractive. Perhaps it's peculiar to America, but at any rate it results in one over-rated and over-hyped book after another, year in and year out. I loathed the humor here, found it tired and obvious; ditto the magic realism. The advertising juggernaut had made me suspicious that there was much less here than was flaunted. Reading it, I found that to be the case. As BR Myers says so well in A Readers Manifesto, why not read a richly observed novel by Balzac instead, rather than another so-called "must read"?
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing new here
Review: Good book if you have never read Singer, Marquez or Rushdie. If you think the reviews for EII sound good, read "When Shlameil Went to Warsaw" by Singer, "100 Years of Solitude" by Marquez and "The Moors Last Sigh" by Rushdie and see the source of most all of JSF's "ingenious" devices.
Rating: 
Summary: Everything is not illuminated - and that's as it should be
Review: Yes, I'm jealous. As a sometimes poet, frustrated novelist, and English teacher, I can't help but be jealous of Foer's achievement. His praise is well-deserved; he has managed to make a page turner out of a complex story with complex philosophical musings. There are loose ends to the story (unless I missed something), but life has loose ends -- that is real. The juxtaposition of this reality with the magic realism is intriguing and raises important questions about the relative importance of truth and the imagination. Of course there is humor in Alex's endearing attempts to use thesaurus-burdened words to seem more "intelligent," but perhaps equally important is the fact that his inability to get connotations of words helps the reader to see the irony in the subjects he discusses. My experience with the book may be different, since I listened to the audio version (my first experience with audiobooks)and the speaker who read Alex's sections added a wonderfully engaging accent. Yes, there were times when I had to rewind and listen again to get the pronoun references, and I felt frustrated that I didn't have the book in front of me to savor passages (I may buy it yet). But I was late to many an appointment and sat in the garage for many minutes each time I got home, because I couldn't bear to turn off the story, the humor, the sadness, the wisdom of what I was hearing. This book is fascinating, and if I were teaching at the college level I would consider adding it to my curriculum. The students would love me for it.
Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous
Review: I loved it all, the hysterical mangling of English, the fabulist tale, the story, the characters, the pain, the beauty. This is a lovely, lovely book that I did not want to end.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Believe The Hype
Review: Too much hype. This was a pretty entertaining book that earned far too much overzelous praise from a desperate reading public. The sad thing is that there are so many godawful books getting published that a novel like this that showes some promise is dubbed genius in comparison to the hack market. The "circle of life" plot is too predictable and after half of the book I was ready to hustle things to a conclusion. Mr. Foer can indeed be funny, which is the hardest thing to do, so I'll keep tabs on him even though I'll advise people not to expect too much from this effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, hard to read
Review: This book is hard to read. Before I forced myself to finish it, it was one of four books I was in the middle of. But like Alex 'I proceeded, suspending my temptation to cast off your writing into the garbage, and it all became illuminated.' (p. 142) What I suggest is that Alex is the 'hero' of the novel. He changes and grows. Jonathan does not. Alex is the one looking for truths amid the 'not-truths.' His letters and descriptions of Jonathan's journey show wisdom. Jonathan doesn't even listen when Augustine tells her story so he doesn't even know everything until Alex writes it in his section of the book. Jonathan, who has apparently referred to himself as an 'apprentice' writer (p. 100), writes like a smutty adolescent who has read 'important' books. To think that ten year old boys are capable of having and enjoying the sexual exploits described by Safran Foer is to have either a warped or an overly machismo view of childhood. I would like to think that Safran Foer, the author, knows that Jonathan's sections are over the top and that they will be compared to David Grossman, Marquez, Singer, et. al. and found inferior because Jonathan, the character, is not a good writer.
The trick of the book is not Alex's use of English, which is funny (notice how his English improves as the story goes on), but that everything Alex writes is written with full knowledge of all the events of the story. So this book needs to be re-read to be understood because Alex is referring to occurrences that we can't know about until we have finished the book. Safran Foer hides information in the middle of nonsense so that it is easy to miss it. For example look at the passing mention of the stolen box on page 23. At the point in the story when it crops up, that information is background noise. The book has flaws: it is an effort to read (it has to be re-read to be understood), it makes no sense for Jonathan's grandfather to die of cancer; the end of the book is wrong; the explanation of 'in case of' is confusing, etc., but there is truth and beauty in the book and it is worth reading. Finally one Amazon reviewer pointed out that there are many definitions of the word 'illuminate.' I still wonder whether the title is ironic or whether it refers to 'illuminate' as 'reflection.'
Rating:
Summary: He's a Genius
Review: I finally got around to reading this book, after it seems most of the world has already discovered it. I hesitate a lot because of all the hullabaloo around it. But, WOW, I'm glad a put all that nonsense, both the hyperbole and the obvious resentment of some, aside, and just enjoyed the book for what it is. What is it? A madly brilliant novel. It's untamed and sometimes self-indulgent, yes, but who could miss the deepest compassion at the heart of this book. The style is wild and risky, the novel is hilariously funny, but what really left its mark on me is the sadness. Foer has an uncanny wisdom, he is able to give expression to a deep melancholy which in a profound way defines even our happinesses. It's literally shocking that a writer so young could be so technically ambitious and brilliant, but even more that he can know so much, understand such profound things about humanity. This is a heavy book, at times a little confusing. Yet the ultimate compliment I can pay EII is that is a gloriously fun book to read. It has immense buzzing energy that made me tear through it, laughing, crying, and in plain wonder at how a novel that in a sense shouldn't work, affected me so deeply. This is a book I will never forget. And Foer is a writer that I'm sure will surprise and amaze us with what comes next. I highly recommend Everything Is Illuminated. Ignore the hype, the backlash, and READ THE BOOK.
Rating:
Summary: The truth is mid-way
Review: Basically, there are two storylines in 'Everything is Illuminated' that sort of weave drunkenly toward each other. In the first, Jonathan Safran Foer sets off for the Ukraine hoping to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alexi, who is Jonathan's Ukrainian translator, narrates about 100 pages in thesaurus-assisted, comically bad English. The second plot chronicles the tribulations of Jonathan's forebears in Trachimbrod, a town which comes to a tragic end during the Nazi occupation. Foer admits in an interview that "For the book's recounting of that trip, he made everything up; he did no factual research for the chapters about Trachimbrod, which was an actual village decimated in World War II. 'I sort of went out of my way to be ignorant about a lot of stuff I was writing about just so I'd have more imaginative latitude.'"
What's reprehensible is not relying solely on imagination, but using actual names. Foer could easily have made up the name of the town as well as the country. When comedian Andy Kauffman created the character of Lotka, he gave him an accent that didn't correspond to any genuine eastern European nation and so Kauffman wisely made up the country of which Lotka was supposedly a native. While reviewers seem either to excoriate young Foer or praise him to the heavens, the truth seems somewhere in between. There is a great deal of talent here but you can sense the handprints on his back, indicating he was pushed out there on the stage maybe a little too early. Imagine what this book might have been with a little more time to simmer. As it is, despite the parts that are quite funny and some riffs of lyrical surreality, it doesn't hold together overall. It starts out strong but becomes progressively more difficult to believe in as jokes become repetitive and the writing, which seemed fresh at first, becomes predictable. This book should be packaged with Vincent Czyz's 'Adrift in a Vanishing City', but it won't be because Czyz's book, which came out four years earlier, had a small publisher, no hype and no famous writing teacher to push it. Yet its lyricism is even more pervasive and while it is not as funny as Foer's book, its characters are so much less caricatures and its vision-you have to pay attention--is more breathtaking. Still, they are both vivid, original voices and if you check out one, you should certainly check out the other.
Rating:
Summary: Bling
Review: I can't think of a better example of the badness of generation-x's self-important sense of its self than this book. What is being tauted as bold and complex and original in this book has either already been done, numerous times, or is just plain sloppiness on the part of an undisciplined writer. It's all bling, bling, bling. No bam! No kablooey! No wow.
Rating:
Summary: Moving if uneven
Review: There are many story lines and narrative styles populating "Everything is
Illuminated". One of the threads--a series of letters and a narrative by a
sensitive Ukrainian-- is at once moving and hilarious.
Other narratives (which explore the history, myths, and development of a
small village) are burdened with one-dimensional characters who experience
supernatural occurrences-- these story-lines are an awkward mix of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mythical communities and Isaac Bashevis Singer's
old European tales. They read more like writing exercises than as
necessary sections of this story. As the novel chugs along, the narratives
mingle and Everything is Illuminated becomes addictive, shocking, and
honest.
Some novels never take a wrong step and are perfect combinations of
addictive plots and previously undiscovered insights (The Stone Diaries, A
Confederacy of Dunces, David Copperfield are a few). Everything is
Illuminated is not a perfect book, but its good parts are great-- an
exhausting emotional roller-coaster.
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