Everything Is Illuminated : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Dream
Review: This book is a dream! No, really, from the very first introductions to our guide, Alex, and "the hero", our heartstrings are warned that they will become endeared to the characters. Even Alex's poetic, and terribly impractical, English draws you into the complexity of the story at hand. The balance of the impractical, and the stoically practical, mirror the fantastic contrast of beauty and ugliness that it portrayed in this book. The author's grasp of mortality is striking, almost to the point of being painful. The flashbacks to eighteenth and nineteenth century times have a distinct dreamlike quality, and like dreams, leave you with a longing to hear more, an empty spot that wasn't there before. Overall, this book takes the swirling logic of dreams and places it on paper in an enjoyable, and thoroughly readable, format. This book changed my day, I can't wait to read another.

Rating:
Summary: A true sign of a quality novel...
Review: ...is that it always divides the literary camp. I, too, am a bit puzzled by the starkly negative reviews, but to each, his own. I thought the prose was amazing, and JSF's storytelling abilities are masterful. I need not rehash the plot since many others have already done so. Lovers of magic realism will probably enjoy this book. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Beautiful, stunning and comical. Touching and sad and happy and significant all at once.

Rating:
Summary: breathtaking
Review: I was legitimately surprised to see such negative reviews of this book. I read it over the summer while in Italy and was forced to forsake exploring the Italian countryside just so I could finish this book. The structure of the novel, while initially confusing, immediately becomes clear as you progress. As a writer myself, I was particularly impressed by the language used-- there are no cliches or trite phrases here. Instead, JSF has combined words in new ways to describe a shtetl that seems to be one step removed from any world that we know, a young girl who is several steps removed from that shtetl, and the people who are directly connected to the shtetl and the girl through history. All of this is intertwined with WWII and the atrocities of the Nazis. While reading this book I was taken through the whole range of human emotion; laughter, suspense, shock, horror, and tears. The book is truly enchanting and a must read for anyone, especially those who are fans of the magical-realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others of his genre.

Rating:
Summary: Above average attempt at humor
Review: Foer's attempt at the comical journey, is remaniscent of many TV sitcoms where one's pre-conceptions of many situations can lead to many supposedly funny misunderstandings.
Thirty-mintues of this type of humor is bearable; but near 300 pages? I had no impulse to finish the book. I was hoping for a message, a statement, and all I got was the author telling me: Who really cares?
As for the inventive style of Foer to place himself within the conifines of the story; that was done before and with the ironic twist that I think Foer was aiming for in Martin Amis' "Money".
Foer is not qualified enough to refill Amis' inkwell, judging by this poor effort.

Rating:
Summary: I'm jealous of anyone about to begin this book
Review: I could not put this book down. The girl walking down the street running into fire hydrants? Me reading this novel. Please don't give up on it. It sneaks up on you and changes you forever.

Rating:
Summary: Drastically Overrated and Not A Good Read
Review: Based on all the hype, I was actually going to buy this book. Hardcover. At the last minute I bought another book and borrowed this book from the library instead. Who says God never interferes? He saved me from wasting money on an utterfly forgettable book. Now if only I hadn't wasted the time to read it.

This book is bad. The manner in which it's shaped makes it hard to care much about the characters, and the bits of the book the 'author' in the story is writing not only are unpleasant to read don't add anything to the overall shape/feel of the story.

Honestly this book in terms of actual quality deserves one star. It's a poorly written book heralded by the literati, because it's form was unique, but they forgot the basic premise of any piece of writing: to SAY something...this book doesn't say anything. I only gave it two stars because the form was interesting even if the author's writing didn't match up to it.

Rating:
Summary: Read It
Review: "Everything is Illuminated" is the story of a young American (also with the name Jonathan Safran Foer, but this is a work of fiction) who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the holocaust. In the process the book tells several stories: the American's trip to the Ukraine, the story of his grandfather and the town history, his Ukrainian translator's personal struggles with family and identity, and his Ukrainian translator's grandfathers experience during the war. These stories are told in different voices, in different chapters interspersed throughout the book. Some of these work better than others, as Foer seems to have a desire to stretch into literary gimmicks that are not always neccesary. But when he gets it right the passages are as moving as anything I have ever read. His variety of voices allows a reflection on certain elements of the story that reinforces their meaning. Writing about love, personal history, death, and living on allows ample opportunity to take on issues that go to the heart of what it means to be human. It also creates the possibility of falling into a bottomless pit of reflection, over-analysis, and huge failure. This book flirts with those pitfalls at times, but never falls in. It creates scenes of incredible trauma, and manages to tell the story in a way that seems real (a significant achievement for a writer born in 1977).

I am struggling to even describe the book, which speaks the complexity of the story and the skill in telling it. I am sure that my enjoyment of the book was enhanced by witnessing first hand some of the absurdity of life in Ukraine, but that is only part of the story. I also probably related in a more personal manner to the stories of the holocaust, being Jewish myself, but I think that anyone with a heart will be able to understand the feelings that Foer is conveying. Regardless of where you are coming from, if you are looking for a moving, literary novel the best (and perhaps only) thing to say about this book is, "read it."

Rating:
Summary: I loved reading this book.
Review: It is one of the best books I've read in years. Very creative and touching.

Rating:
Summary: Another unfulfilled promise
Review: In in the interest of keeping this bashing brief and to the point, Foer fails to deliver the goods for the following reasons: lazy writing, ignorance of exploited subject matter, contrived characters and dramatic developments, cheap use of literary gimmicks to cover up lack of story.

Dear reader, allow me to bore and irritate you by declaring that Foer is utterly ignorant of the Russian language, Ukrainian customs, and my native city of Odessa. Allegedly, he shrugs his lack of research off with a laugh. This rather alarming habit of trivializing the importance of factual subject matter is disgusting not because it violates some objective paradigm of literary virtue, but because it exploits a grave and meaty subject while laughing off the hard work it deserves. Perhaps Foer thinks that his lazy scattering and transpositioning of English words transcends a dozen hours of mechanically generated Thesaurus entries. It does not.

Further along the same lines, the character of Alex is nothing more than a monkey sitting at an aforementioned electronic thesaurus and spitting out strings of unfunny, un-Russian, and lazy gibberish. If Foer wasn't busy trying to hack out Clockwork Orange or Catch-22, he might have spent more hours at a library or even bothered to learn some Russian to at the very least recognize speech patterns. Instead, we have a 'clever' 300 page wordplay and sketches.

Now, as for the subject itself, Foer, like so many polished young writers without anything to write about, chooses to borrow drama from someone else; not only a person, but a time. Like so many writers of little imagination, he digs in a fictional past (which he, once again, fails to investigate). So, Foer chooses to rewrite history and manipulate tragedy to infuse his story with an adequate sense of importance. WWII and the Holocaust, 2 of the major cataclysms of the modern era, are thrown into Foer's meatgrinder. This because the writer is so dry that he has to travel to another land and time - no, to invent another land and time (while affecting their reality) to spark his mind.

Oh, you might think that the story is redeemed by Foer's wicked satirical abilities. About the only scene I found funny was the potato-dropping incident in the restaurant. Shame on you Mr. Foer for butchering the English language (and not in any positive way). Shame on you for writing a fictitious piece of fictional storytelling.