Rating: 
Summary: "Illuminated" has its shining moments
Review: "Everything Is Illuminated" is the wildly acclaimed story of a college student's journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II. Jonathan Safran Foer (the fictional character - not the author, though the author made a similar trip while in college) was guided in his quest by a young Ukranian, Alex, who introduces himself to the reader at the start of the book. This had better get good soon, I thought, because this character's broken English reminds me of those Saturday Night Live skits featuring the "wild and crazy guys." It did get good, with an emotionally engaging story hiding amidst a lot of postmodern gimmickry. The story alternates between Jonathan's account of the trip, Alex's account of the trip (and his comments on Jonathan's account), and Jonathan's narration of a fairy-tale-like history of his ancestral village, Trachimbrod. I agree with some of the other reviewers that parts of this book are worth a second reading, but I can't imagine slogging through the Trachimbrod story again. Its "magical realism" ranges from the amusing to the inexplicable (a young boy's crippled arm as a fetish object for a whole village of women? YUCK!) and ultimately serves only to provide ironic distance from the emotional core of the book. I read with a mixture of excitement and dread as the narratives converged toward the terrible events of the war, and as the interconnection between the characters' families grew more apparent. The ending was more "huh?" than "aha!" but the book was worth reading despite its flaws.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant drama and humor not intended for the beach
Review: Pay no attention to the carping about the author's youth and the novel's disjointed narrative structure - this is a brilliantly poignant, surreal, and laugh-out-loud funny story that will stay with you long after you've finished reading it. Sure, it's not lightweight beach reading but nor is it inaccessible like some pretentious D. F. Wallace fiction. And long after you think you've forgotten all about it, you'll see some misbehaving dog gnawing at his tail and think fondly of Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.
Rating: 
Summary: A One-Trick Pony Rides On for too Long
Review: What works well as a short story is mind-numbing as a novel. All schtick. Having one of the lead characters translate all his writing into broken English with a dictionary grates after a humorous start. The flashbacks about people with insane names grates too. I fought to finish this book. I lost the battle. A literary hoax with raves from friends and teachers of the author. This is Dale Peck's (the best first novel he ever held) and Joyce Carol Oates' lowest moment.
Rating: 
Summary: Sour Grapes
Review: Having just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's wonderful first novel, I am reminded of Saul Bellow's comments about the then twenty-six-year-old Philip Roth after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus: "Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair and teeth." Like Roth, Foer, only twenty-five when his book was published, hit one out of the park his first time at bat, and so naturally his effort has drawn as much critical invective as praise. That the book received so much pre-publication press virtually assured as much. But the fact remains: by any standard Foer has written a good book; by the standard of his youth, however, he has written a remarkable book, one fully deserving of all the critical attention it has received. Those who would fault the novel's disjointed structure, narrative time shifts and challenging language (particularly in the letters of Alex Perchov) would do well to see the works of James Joyce, whose influence on Foer, it seems to me, is most recognizable in the novel's brilliant final chapters. As for those legions of frustrated "writers" (creative writing students, bookstore clerks, etc.) who seem always to go into fits when a young author has his or her first big success, all would do well to stop obsessing over Foer's tender age and instead focus on the manuscript languishing in their garage or in a bottom drawer somewhere, unfinished and unread. Everything Is Illuminated is a fine novel by a fine young writer whose success, I assure you, is no coincidence. Just read him and see.
Rating:
Summary: Kick'n
Review: I'm amazed at the number of people who didn't like this book. I'd never even stopped to consider that it was anything but one of the best books I'd ever read, and I hadn't read any reviews of the book until now. All I can say is that I loved the book--it moved me to both laughter and tears, and that I think is the best praise any book could hope to recieve, and the best that I can give it.
Rating:
Summary: Somewhere between a premium book and a failed experiment
Review: Jonathan Foer proves himself a good writer, a remarkably good one when taking his age into consideration. Yet, "Everything is Illuminated" may qualify as an interesting experiment, but not a great novel. Without repeating many of the comments that previous reviewers brought up, I think that Foer's ambition in this book is at odds with his current abilities. He is an Icarus who can really fly fast and high, yet would have greatly benefited from a better laid out flight schedule. Anybody interested in studying the requirements that make a fractured -exploding may be a better word- novel work, should read Weissburger's companion to Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow". This companion shows that an author needs to come up with a very tight game plan to successfully venture of the deep end. After finishing Foer's novel I could not help but think that a work that started with a great first 150 pages just fell apart in the rest of the book. While it's current bestseller status may expose a part of the Higgins Clark and Grisham readership to something more challenging, both the narrative structure and self-referential post-modern elements took me on a road to nowhere. While I personally have not read a Holocaust novel carrying a (post-)modern signature, I cannot but agree with previous reviewers that almost everything in this novel has been done better before. The crucial scenes of the book portraying the atrocities of the Holocaust are very well written and powerful. Yet, not unlike Sasha, Foer's premium alter ego, I fail to see how the historically rather questionable portrayal of promiscuity in an orthodox Jewish environment and the butchering of the integrity of the writer's own Holocaust surviving grandfather can be viewed as elements that illuminate or support the narrative structure. Thus, I can imagine that people whose own families where touched by one of history's darkest moments, may be less than enthusiastic in response to this novel. This book took me on a road to nowhere and I an only partly successful experiment. Especially, since Foer has such great writing skills, I had expected an ending more in line with the earth shattering finale of Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". Yet, Foer is young and shows enough promise for true illumination.
Rating:
Summary: "Illuminated" Left Me In the Dark
Review: I knew that Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated" had its fair share of fans, but after my own valiant struggle with it I was hoping I was not be alone in just not "getting" this experimental novel. Overall, I found it to be messy and flashily hip (look all the things I can do!). Foer's work has been called genius - but as is often said, there is a fine line between genius and insanity. "Illuminated" is a roller-coaster ride with way too many loops, twists, and turns - not in plot or characters, but literary gimmicks (hair-pulling overuse of italics and indentations and capitalization, parts written like letters, play dialogue, or entries in a reference book, and pages filled with the same phrase repeated dozens/hundreds(?) of times over, etc.). That said there are pieces (albeit small pieces) of the novel that I found engaging and even entertaining. There is plenty of humor throughout as well as passages that are simply devastating. So despite my overall feeling about the novel, there is certainly I hold no doubts that Foer has plenty of talent. Because of that potential and a hope that he can harness this talent, I will cautiously entertain the idea of reading his second novel. I consider myself a pretty well read person, one who is open for a challenging read, but "Illuminated" simply got to the point where it was an experience to be finished, not enjoyed.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Read - But It Isn't "Atlas Shrugged" Or Anything...
Review: foer gives us a nice little character study that shoots back and forth through time, covering different eras, some made up stuff and some true history mixed in with the fiction. the guy absolutely lost me at the end though. it could be said that he was too ambitious or lost his way at the climax or knew what he was doing and i just didn't get it. it has suddenly become en vogue to end novels on kitchy notes, a little too artsy-fartsy if u ask me. but i did enjoy the book.
Rating:
Summary: Too clever by half
Review: I, like many other reviewers here, was led to read this novel by the rave reviews it received in the press (oh, and the nifty, multi-colored paperback editions - own the whole set! Bless the marketing department). Unfortunately, I can't wholeheartedly recommend the book. There are passages of great power and memorability, but then again, he is using material guaranteed to break hearts. The last third finally captured my complete attention, but what work it was to get there. There's a fine line between true innovation and incomprehensibility - too often blurred here, I'm afraid. Magic realism is enough of an affectation without throwing in run-together dialogue, no punctuation, non-linear plotting, etc. It's as if Safran Foer took every post-modern narrative technique he ever heard of and jammed it in. Some see this as ultra hip and stylish; I see it as a needless impediment to a really fine story (that he obviously doesn't trust enough to tell). It's too easy to make cheap cracks about not being "illuminated," so I won't, but I will say that some of the only things the very young Mr. Foer makes clear are some of his sexual fantasies (I lost count of how many times someone "does it from behind." ). I'm not a prude when it comes to literature, but I started to get embarrassed for him. My advice would be to trust your tale, and to tell it in a way that communicates something genuine to your audience - not just that you have an extremely inventive mind.
Rating:
Summary: A Postmodern Mess from an Overeducated Sentimentalist
Review: From the advance hype of this book, I had gotten the impression that Foer was the budding savior of American literature. Indeed, the excerpt printed in the New Yorker two years ago was very entertaining, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Alas, that excerpt was the very best part of the book. No doubt, pseudo-intellectuals will try to convince us that Everything Is Illuminated reveals the impossibility of textualizing a catastrophic event such as the Holocaust and forming cross-cultural and multigenerational blah blah blah. The fact is, great authors have done all of that and more; Jonathan Safran Foer does not. Strangely, Foer's refusal to form a plot does not prevent him from indulging in sentimental pontification or preachy dialogue (sample: "I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is"). Apparently, we're all supposed to sit back and think, "Whoa, dude, that's deep." I'm not having it. The early chapters are engaging, but Foer wanders off early and never comes back. One clever narrative trick cannot sustain a novel. Those interested in actual literary depth concerning the Holocaust may wish to read the novels or stories of Arnost Lustig.
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