Rating: 
Summary: everything is illuminated
Review: amazing, simply amazing . . . the off beat, broken word choices spoken by Alex make me laugh and rethink the english language at the same time
Rating:
Summary: dialogue will set you free
Review: everyone says the reviews for this were way overrated, and the reviewers should be blamed for that instead of the author. yeah, it was a bit stuffy at times, but there was too much humanism to accuse Foer of being pseudo intellectual. there were a lot of lists of details that may seem gratuitous but i saw them as trying to give an accurate feeling for the idiosyncrosies of a certain culture. my favorites include the book of dreams and the different kinds of sadness. but the clincher is vernacular. it's not easy to write in voice like this, just ask irvine welsh or anthony burgess. additionally, i've been living overseas for the past few years, including europe, the balkans, and even the middle-east, and that's how people who learn English as a second language through academics sound. for all of you who've never been to europe or otherwise, the rest of the world has a much larger english vocabulary than the average ignorant american.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the wait
Review: Just when you're about to give up on modern fiction, a book like this comes along. Underwhelmed by a slew of lukewarm offerings from hot young authors, I waited to get this novel until it was in paperback and discounted before succumbing to the hype. Foer practically had me at "Chapter 1." This author not only writes beautifully--he's also very funny. Why are so many young literary lions afraid to crack a joke? Not that "Everything" doesn't also move you to tears at times and bring home the horrific reality of the Holocaust in "Fiddler on the Roof" country. The whimsy does start to pall toward the end, however, as the character of Brod takes center stage. She's a bit too perfect, and the Chagall-esque phantasmagoria that Foer has so carefully created starts verging on "Mulan" melodrama. The ending was also somewhat muddled, but I can't wait to read this book again.
Rating: 
Summary: Everything is Illuminated
Review: What the......????? I don't know what all the critics saw in this novel. JSF is the latest "hot writer"? What is up with that? If you read the reviews, you are led like a trusting sheep,(by some of my favorite authors & reviewers) into believing that you are reading something profound. Profound? The description of the flatulent Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. (dog) ...was that supposed to be a leg slapping hoot? It is just a tragically bad, self-indulgent, psuedo- intellectual rant. This has no beginning middle or end-nothing happens. The worst of the best-selling tripe, which the publishing industry has spoon fed to a poor unsuspecting public in a long time. I am in complete shock that anyone would endorse this book in any way.
Rating:
Summary: Read it!
Review: I loved this book! The language, the style, and the humor made it worth every second of reading it, and since I've owned it, I've read it 3 times.
I am, unabashedly, a stylist, and I love the way Jonathan Safran Foer plays with words and language to tell his story--especially his use of a Ukranian narrator for much of the narrative.
I find this an astonishingly good debut novel, and I hope that others will find the same pleasure in it that I was able to.
Rating:
Summary: Yuck
Review: What a disappointment. So much hype yet so little follow through. I don't know what all the critics saw in this novel, but all I saw was a young, smug, pseudo-intellectual, half-talent trying desperately to show off how literary he can be without actually telling a good story. Man, you gots to save your money. Many good books out there, this ain't one of them.
Rating: 
Summary: Everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.
Review: If Jonathan Safran Foer were, say, 42, and this were his 3rd or 4th book, I wonder whether it would received the same vociferous critical acclaim. Don't get me wrong. It's a good book. A fine book. And that it is the product of a 20 year old mind, well... that's astonishing. But, the thing is, if I may lend my support to the few dissenting voices here, I was disappointed. I came to the book burdened with the mantle of those incredible "the latest boy genius to break my heart!" reviews. What I found was a story that did not seem to be Foer's to tell. Humor is the one stay against what can feel like the chaos of oblivion, and I appreciate the use of humor in the treatment of the tragic/sick/sometimes beautiful human condition. But, Foer seems to treat the subject of the Holocaust in a manner which is at times, facile -- cartoonish even. And, a lot of his comic talent seems to be in using the thesaurus to conjure the cracked English (consistently misused synonyms) of one of the two co-narrators. (This, on balance, was more annoying to me as a reader, than funny). I felt that some of the story was his - the searching, the longing for answers, for some grasp on those strange glimmering histories which stir beneath the depths of time. We all, in this generation, must look into those murkey waters and feel the strange, bereft feeling that comes simply from not knowing how or why human history took the turns it did... But, frankly, I don't think that Foer was equipped to tell the story of the tragic events his characters endured. Foer would have been much better off staying closer to his own experience as a young man to whom the past is lost, but seemingly forever alluring, beckoning, meaningful, necessary. In THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, Kundera writes about Nietzsche's concept of 'eternal return,' suggesting that an event (such as a war) becomes altered if we imagine it recurring eternally: "It will," he writes, "become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable..." He goes on to write, "How can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine." It seems to me that Foer must have gotten his title from this quote (though I can't seem to find any corroboration for this guess), and I admire his ambition in trying to address this difficult subject: the conflict between feeling the vivid, brittle, agonizing impact of love and loss, of irreparable inanity -- and moving on, looking with a romantic nostalgia at the past through diaphanous veils of time. Yes. I admire that ambitious effort. And yet, I was struck again and again by the lack of weight, by the unbearable lightness of this story. It takes guts to take on the Holocaust. But gutsiness doesn't make for good literature, necessarily. What's missing in this story is gravitas.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Fails Miserably
Review: This book is an industrial product, manufactured in creative writing workshops, assembled in corporate conglomerate publishing houses complete with prefabricated blurbs from grade-A hypesters. The book is merely an attempt of the corporate conglomerate literary industry to print money. There is no beginning, middle, nor end. There is no antagonist nor protagonist. Nobody falls in/out of love. Nothing happens. The book just rambles on and on and on. And now that we know Dave Eggers writes reviews for his cohort's books, all the positive reviews are suspect. Don't be duped by the dupers here.
Rating:
Summary: a great accomplishment
Review: Oh my god. You want a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? Read Everything Is Illuminated. Jonathan Safran Foer has managed to write a book that is stunning on both an intellectual and an emotional level. There is no experience that can compare to reading a book like that--very little in life can so deeply affect both your intelligence and your heart at the same time. What most impressed me about the book was the way in which it successfully managed to operate on so many different levels. Not only are there three distinct narratives, but each of these narratives ostensibly comes from a different source. There's the story of Jonathan's trip to the Ukraine ("written" by Alex), there's Alex's half of the correspondence between Alex and Jonathan, and then there's the history of Trachimbrod as written by Jonathan for his novel. It's difficult to talk about a book as complicated as this one. It is a novel, but it's also an absurdist sort of "behind the scenes" look at the creation of a novel. It's written by Jonathan Safran Foer, who also happens to be one the main characters and the character of Jonathan is also busy at writing a novel, which comprises parts of the novel that you're now reading. In his letters, Alex often alludes to editorial changes that should be made in both his and Jonathan's chapters of the book, and also discusses points at which the narrative he is writing departs from the truth of what really happened. Actually, it almost seems like the book is composed of exactly what you might have found if you had decided to rifle through Foer's desk while he was in the process of writing the book. Of course, you wouldn't really have found all that stuff, because the book wasn't really put together in the way in which it suggests that it was. And this brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of the book, which is the fact that there's no real way to know how much of it is real. The main character, who just happens to have the same name as the author, travels to the Ukraine to research his roots in order to write a book. He befriends his young Ukrainian translator, and gets him involved in the writing of the book as well. But there's no way to know how any of this corresponds to the real world. Is the Jonathan in the book supposed to be the same as the real Jonathan? Did he really take a trip to the Ukraine? Is there a real Alex somewhere out there? Was there ever really a town named Trachimbrod? By blurring the line between what is and isn't fiction, the book very successfully induces readers to question our notions of history, of fact, of truth, and also of the importance of absolute truth. In the end, does it really matter whether or not Trachimbrod existed? The things that happened there, the way the town was destroyed, those things are real and happened in so many places, what does it matter whether or not Trachimbrod itself ever existed? Either way, it doesn't exist anymore, and that's the important part. These questions about Trachimbrod bring up the remarkable way in which the town is dealt with in the book. The chapters dealing with the history of the town (the only part of the book that is really supposed to be authored by Foer) all have a very magical-realist sensibility to them. Many of the things that supposedly happened in Trachimbrod seem like they could have been lifted straight from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The town and its residents are unique and bizarre, and those qualities make the demise of the town seem even more terrible. Trachimbrod was unique in every possible way up to the moment when its destroyers arrived, at which point it became indistinguishable from every other shtetl that was destroyed in exactly the same way. This book is also very interesting because of the questions of identity it brings up. From the very beginning, Foer's placement of himself in the narrative forces the reader to wonder about the accuracy of that representation. In fact, Foer raises that particular question himself when Alex basically writes to Jonathan to say that he won't include the fact that Jonathan is short in his portion of the book. The identity questions go further than that, however, because as you read you begin to discover that Alex is also not actually the fabulous Odessa party boy that he initially presented himself to be. Alex beginning to come clean about his identity and revealing the deep emotional impact that the trip had on him is, in my opinion, one of the most moving aspects of the book. So both Alex and Jonathan have adjusted their identities in print, but then you find out that Alex's grandfather has really done what Alex and Jonathan are only playing at doing. He changed his name, moved, and hid his entire previous identity from his own son. So again you're left wondering: What exactly is identity? How do we ever know for sure that someone is who he says he is? There's really no way to be any more certain about a person's identity than there is about the history of a town that may never have existed. But, despite all of these wonderful intellectual facets of the book, the thing that really got me, as always, was it's emotional impact. I'm not even sure that I can describe just how moving this book was. Every single character seems to have such a deeply touching story, and all are touching in such different ways. There are so many different moments of high emotional impact: When Alex talks about his grandfather's sadness, when Jonathan talks about sitting under his grandmother's skirt, when Augustine tells the story of what happened to Trachimbrod and mentions that the sound of anything falling on the floor reminds her of her sister's death and you instantly think back to the potato that fell on the floor when they first met her, when you learn from Alex's grandfather about what Alex did at the very end, when the grandfather tells the story of his own secret past. And there are even more. It truly is an amazing book. I feel that there is so much more that I could say. I haven't even talked about how funny the book is! You'll just have to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Novel and inventive, but not equal to its hype
Review: A great deal of fuss has been made of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel "Everything Is Illuminated". Indeed, the inner sleeves are covered with so much critical hype I couldn't help but venture out to find out for myself. Well, is it the blazingly original masterpiece everyone says it is ? Probably not, as I have mixed feelings about it. Sure, it's daring, swanky and boldly irreverential in its novel format. The book pans out as a combination of letters, backward and sometimes logic defying time scales, dream sequences, poems, and selected passages from the Jewish Holy Book. Using a cross cultural alter ego to tell a story of personal devastation and loss, of memory and fate that reaches back to the depths of the deep distant past, Foer also paints - by inference and suggestion than narrative detail - an unspeakably bleak landscape of human misery left by the Nazi era on the surviving Jewish community in Europe. The novel is at its most emotionally resonant and powerful when Foer is at his least deliberate, consciously clever and innovative, and the linear storyline is allowed to develop and find a natural rhythm to its flow...but unfortunately, these moments don't come often enough. That's because it keeps getting interrupted by Foer's obsessive need to keep pace with the not very illuminating parallel story from the distant past. The direct Russian-to-English translation of the English language may be funny and inventive - up to a certain point - but beyond it, the novelty wears out, it gets tiresome and starts to grate. It doesn't help that Foer isn't an assured enough writer at this stage to resist using gimmicks. Sammy Davis Jr, Jr, the narrator Alex's pet dog, is clearly one. Having got his early laughs out of this "character", poor Sammy makes his exit quite inexplicably without being noticed, or did Foer simply forget while churning out his cast of a myriad of one-scene-only characters ? Most disconcerting of all is that Foer doesn't even have the good grace to play it straight when he drops the big one on us. I had to flip back and forth between certain easy-to-miss but crucial passages from different parts of the novel to make out the secret that should have made the mind bending reading exercise all worthwhile. Quite apart from Foer's reliance on unlikely coincidences for its denouement, "Everything Is Illuminated", while brave,original and experimental, isn't the assured literary work of groundbreaking importance it is made out to be. The good parts are brilliant, inspired even but overall, it's a far too contrived piece of fictional writing to be hailed as a masterpiece. Next time, Foer should just let his hair down and see where it takes him.
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