Read 2015. Minor edits 2022. I was quite blunt back then :))

This book seems like it was written by someone on drugs. It screams - I am such a special and interesting book. It was indeed special but not always in a good way.

I have such mixed feelings about this novel. There were some parts that I liked and others in which I wanted to close the book and delete it from my Kindle. I wanted to stop so many times but somehow I kept going and then I found some passages that made me want to hang on in there.The last 20% of the book was torture.

So, as a short summary. A Jew American goes to Ukraine to find the woman that helped his grandparents escape from the Nazis. He travels together with an interpreter (Alex, the only character I connected with), his grandfather and a crazy dog. They do not find the woman but of course it does not matter because the plot is just a pretext to launch in a series of side stories and philosophy. The book is fragmented, he employs a lot of (too many) literary gimmicks to tell the story : letters, different POV, excerpts from books, three pages of dots etc. I enjoyed the letters sent by Alex to the "hero". Those really tried to convey a meaning to the whole story and made me care for the character. However, most of the other gimmicks were distracting and unnecessary. Pages and pages of dull nonsense which only succeeded to irritate me.

The author is trying to be deep and make us feel the horrors of the Holocaust. He succeeded nicely through the confession of Alex's grandfather and through Alex's story. What I did not like about this book, is the invented history of the "hero"'s ancestors. Pretentious hyper realism of sorts. I just disliked most of it.

Valóban prémium könyv. Újraolvasható, vagyis kedvenc. Sikítóan röhögséges és néholvást mélyenszántóan holtkomoly. Mint az élet maga, ami hol nagybetűs, hol meg egész kicsi. Sok szempontból tetszett JSF regénye, de alább most egy szektariánusabb olvasat-koncepciómat járatom körbe.
Már rég behúzott az örvénylő Trachimbrodiáda, mire a történetörvény háromnegyedén szöget ütött a szemembe az a mondat (nagyjából), hogy még azt is feljegyezték, mit evett reggelire valamelyik ősapjuk egy csütörtöki reggelen. Ez az ősapa pedig nem más, feleim, mint a birkavesét reggelizett jó Leopold Bloom, 1904 június 16-án, ami történetesen csütörtökre esett. Bizony.
Annyi párhuzam van a Minden vilángol és a Ulysses között, hogy csak na. Az egymásba fonódó történetek vezérszálai egy fiatal ember (Aleksz Perchov – Stephen Dedalus) sorsszerű és meghatározó találkozása egy idősebb emberrel (Jonathan Safran Foer – Leopold Bloom), valamint kettejük körül kavarog egy helyszín egész történelme és mitológiája (Trachimbrod, Ukrajna – Dublin, Írország). Az idősebb férfi történetesen zsidó (mindketten), és távoli kultúrákat idéznek meg (Amerika – Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia). A rengeteg stilisztikai és nyelvi játék, szimbolika és miegymás kibogozása szintén érdekes lenne, ám meghaladja szerény képességeimet. Az viszont kétségtelen, hogy erős Joyce-i hatás érződik a regényben – és ahogy az Ulysses, úgy ez is erősen intertextuális, azaz telistele van utalásokkal egy bibliográfiányi másik könyvre (többek között Marquez és I.B. Singer írásaira). És ez így van nagyon jól! Sok remek könyv működik így, és a legjobb, mikor az író két kézzel szórja a felgöngyölíthető rejtélyeket a nyomozóhajlamúbb olvasó útjába. Ujjongok.
Ugyanakkor Joyce monstre regényével ellentétben, ez a könyv (relatív) könnyen olvasható. Ez viszont mit sem vesz el az élményből. Ötös!

One of the nice things about being stoned is the added dimension of humor or profundity that otherwise inconsequential things can assume in our impression of them. I remember once having my mind blown at the idea of language, and how any two unrelated people, having been raised in the same country and while having no connection at all to each other, or there being any crossover among those who have taught or influenced them, can meet each other one day and have a mutually intelligible conversation. Fascinating, right? Well, no not really, but it sure as hell seems fascinating when you’re high.

I feel as though the only way I could have read this book and found it as funny and profound as other readers found it is if I were completely and totally baked.

Everything Is Illuminated is essentially comprised of two narratives interwoven in a nonlinear arrangement. The first is the account of a small Jewish settlement in the Ukraine which, along with most of its quirky inhabitants, is wiped out by the invading Nazis in 1941. The “writer” of this section is a fictionalized version of Foer himself, who is a direct descendant of some of these villagers. The second narrative is that of a present-day Ukrainian who recounts his experiences with Foer as they try to locate a mysterious woman who Foer believes helped his family escape that aforementioned invasion. The Ukrainian, whose name is Alex, is hired by the fictional Foer as a translator in his endeavors.

While Alex is the source of much of the book’s comedy in his unintentional misuse of the English language, the comedic value stemming from this quickly ran dry for me. I think there is also an absurdity with which Foer describes the ancestral characters in the Ukrainian village (called Trachimbrod) but to me most of the quirkiness seemed forced and unnatural, and ruined what could have provided an endearing element to the story. I mean, we’re talking about a village wherein characters collect each other’s tears in thimbles and send each other pieces of string that match the length of their body parts in order that their recipients be assuaged of any fear that their loved ones have “changed.” (Blech.)

And then there are the sentences, the ones I think are meant to sound deep and awe-inspiring but which only come across as shallow and trite in my non-Coloradan state of sobriety. (Sorry, Coloradans, but I guess that’s your thing now.) Sentences, for example, like these!

n  We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered—our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

She never ran from his fists, but took them, went to them, certain that her bruises were not marks of violence, but of violent love.

The Kolker was trapped in his body—like a love note in an unbreakable bottle, whose script never fades or smudges, and is never read by the eyes of the intended lover—forced to hurt the one with whom he wanted most to be gentle.n  
n

Yes, there is a lot of talk of love in this book. (I think JSF wrote it before he got himself hitched.)

Anyway, there is a section toward the end of the novel during which Alex’s grandfather reveals an atrocity that occurred in his presence, and in which he was involved, and that revelation was very heartfelt and exemplifies, possibly, what JSF can be good at. But it wasn’t enough to rescue this book from its overall effect of having kind of irritated the crap out of me.

Jonathan Safran Foer comes with a full bag of tricks, all of which he uses in an attempt to dazzle you out of seeing what this book actually is, which is corny. Safran Foer calls himself the product of a sampling culture, but there's more of an air of desperation about this book, which employs play dialogue, diary excerpts, run-on sentences, and like three pages straight of ellipses. The lead character is a Ukrainian named Alex who's gone thesaurus-happy, with an effect that starts off funny and quickly gets insufferable; the funny talk disguises what he's actually saying, which is corny.

It's told in several voices: Alex writing to Safran Foer, Alex writing a book, and Safran Foer's history of his family. The multiple voices allow him to comment on himself as he goes: they're each other's critics, peanut galleries, cheering sections and study groups. Safran Foer congratulates Alex on a particularly clever line about families; Alex analyzes the possible symbolism of Safran Foer's grandfather's erotic dead arm. Since actual Safran Foer wrote all of it, this amounts to self-congratulation.

The family history seems to be entirely made up. It goes heavy on the magical realism. (Special debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from whom Foer even borrows the butterflies.) Safran Foer did visit Ukraine when he was 19, but as far as I can tell no part of his family's story is real, even the parts that aren't obviously surreal. That makes you feel a little manipulated; Safran Foer seems to have appropriated the most heart-wrenching stories he knows about Nazis and Jews. It's easy to make an impact with a story about burning people.

Safran Foer belongs to a 21st century school of clown car authors - David Mitchell is another egregious example - who know a lot of tricks but not a lot of truths. Their stories are flashy but there's not a lot going on underneath. Without its razzle-dazzle, this is basically a maudlin and manipulative novel. Some of the tricks are fun! But it's like that old (racist) stereotype about Chinese food: fun to eat but you're hungry an hour later. This book is just okay.

You are burned out. So you suggested to your wife that the whole family spend the weekend in a beach resort. You left the house in the morning, drove the whole day and arrived at the resort few hours before the sunset. You dropped your things, donned your beach wear, went barefoot and hurriedly went straight to the shore. The sand is not sugar-like but the pain is bearable. The wind is a bit cold and it gives you slight chills. You dip your feet into the water. It is still lukewarm since the sun is just about to set. You start to swim. Then you notice how beautiful the sun is. The kaleidoscope of colors: yellow, orange, bright orange, red, reddish orange. It’s like God’s canvas spluttered with beautiful colors.

You feel mesmerized. Sunset is always breathtaking and you find yourself staring at it, perplexed and speechless. You are there standing, you feel the small stones piercing your soles. With wet hair, your wet clothes on, the water drips to your skin. With the afternoon sea breeze softly blowing, you feel cold. You feel the discomfort, but you don’t care. You go on standing. You go on staring. You want to see the finality of the sunset.

Slowly, slowly. Down. Down. Until it’s gone.

Darkness.

But you remain standing. You want to see what comes next. The shore is part of the bay and you can see lights starting to flicker from the nearby island. The fishermen light up the gas lamps on the boats. You look up at the sky. The crescent-shaped moon starts to appear over at the horizon. And the countless stars twinkle as if they are smiling at you. The small insects start to swarm and bite, you swat them with your hands. You feel the stones poking your skin. You start to shiver from cold. But you feel happy as you have just witness an unspeakable beauty. Something that we tend to ignore as we rush through our daily lives. A celebration of life. A miracle.

You feel utterly happy. Blissful. Joyous.

This is exactly how I felt reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel Everything is Illuminated.

Amazing.

The picaresque interchange between youths is like a more irreverent' albeit magic-natural take on Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. The imperfect prisms, the barriers of language of history and the imagination all these tools of literary alchemy are proudly on display. It attempts to hide the real theme of pathos inherent in all immigrant stories, & that the reader desires desperately to unearth it like nothing else. (Ingeniously, in EiI, a potato falling to the ground becomes a thing of singular beauty. The writer simply must get props poor lathering up this sad story that includes the Holocaust with joyous amounts of high-grade and universal ripoaring comedy. One of the ten most important novels of the new millennium. And its rich; exhilarating; it has balls. It is fresh prose-like-a-rose and exhibits one intuitive, clever, downright beautiful structure. With its proud badges of a first--not to mention major) literary novel audaciousness it is a wondrous, always necessary!-- version of the Don Quixote legend. & you will definitely carve out something in your busy schedule to complete it. And, like me, somehow I really crave for a sequel to this, which I very rarely do, you will think the same.

"Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was." 145

I hated this book, to be honest. Didn't care for the plot or the characters.

Half of the book was presented via one Ukrainian person's narration, which was painful to read because his English is poor. It got old really fast. Random sentence for example:

n  "It is now evident to me that he will become a very potent and generative man, and that his brain will have many muscles. We do not speak in volumes, because he is such a silent person, but I am certain that we are friends, and I do not think I will be lying if I wrote that we are paramount friends."n

The premise is that an American went to Ukraine to look for an old family connection. So it's that typical humorous road trip setup where the humor is pretty much "the population of this strange place is weird". I didn't find it funny. Perhaps because I'm Ukrainian? Ukrainian characters were all "exotic" caricatures, and it felt like being the butt of a joke without being realistic. For example, Sasha (who is from Odesa) says that Lviv is like New York because it has buildings as high as 5 or 6 stories. C'mon! No one would have said that because typical buildings developed under USSR in both Odesa and Lviv were 9 stories, some were higher, but in any case, they were the same. Not to mention I don't think anyone would reasonably liken that to NY.

The dialogues, which take up a large portion of the book, were also painful to read because it's an English speaker trying to communicate with those who know little English. So it's a bunch of "what? what? what?"

The other half of the book felt like a One Hundred Years of Solitude parody. A bunch of weird shit seemed to happen for the sole purpose of making the book "quirky". Well, it was quirky indeed. The main female character was also...

Jedna od onih neobičnih "otkačenih" knjiga koje mi s vremena na vreme nalete i osveže mi dan... Imala sam zadovoljstvo da je čitam u rukopisu pre objavljivanja... Mnogo kasnije nastao je film... Knjiga je, nažalost, kod nas prošla nezapaženo i srećom u međuvremenu mu se promenio izdavač... Koji će možda više učiniti za ovog autora jer on to zaslužuje... Ako volite Marka Haddona ili Dana Rhodesa... ovo je autor za vas... :)

One of the funniest and most adventurous books I've read in a long time. Foer seems to be having fun as he's writing, and it shows in every word of the Alex sections. Okay, yeah, there are some problems with what he's trying to do. But the language almost lets you forget that, and really, it would be a shame to miss the sheer daring of this book.

I liked the idea of the plot a lot: Young Jewish-American (Jonathan) travels to Ukraine to find his family's past. Ends up driving around with his interpreter Alex (bad English), Alex's grandfather (half-blind, nevertheless the designated driver), and their family dog (flatulent). Sounds hilarious. And it is! But that is only the smallest part of the novel. There are also historical sections (from waaay way back) about the village that Jonathan's grandfather (tiny little shtetl in the middle of Ukraine, mostly Jewish villagers) came from and also the village's fate during the Holocaust. I skipped through some of the 19th century stories because i found them too strange ("mythical" is what the book cover calls it).
The book left my with a feeling of consternation. I guess after more than 60 years, mixing funny and serious sections is one way to deal with the Holocaust. For me personally the contrast was too intense. The pieces did not fit together in some places and at one point I felt like I was reading several completely different books (different narratorial perspective didn't help with my confusion).
I can recommend the movie though. It takes out a lot of the boring parts. Yea yea, movies tend to do that and then in the end it doesnt make sense. In this case it helps!
Or read Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (huge improvement!) or his New York Times "Beginner's Guide to Hannukah" (LOL)

It is difficult to rate this book. There were parts that were funny, insightful and moving. These involved Foer's Ukrainian translator. 5 stars for this character and these sections. The shtetl scenes were unbearably ridiculous. I don't understand what Foer had in mind. Nothing was illuminated in these parts so I rated them 1 star.
2 1/2 stars overall.

2.5 stars - It was alright, an average book.

This was Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel, and it showed. There were parts that shined enough that I will definitely be picking up other books by him in the future, but the execution of this one unfortunately made for an irritating reading experience. What will bring me back to his writing is that there were several beautiful quotes/passages, and the author effectively evoked both humor and sadness.

I absolutely loved Alex's character and found his struggles with the English language to be very endearing and charming. In general the modern day story-line was by far the most interesting. Regrettably, Alex is only present for about 1/3 of the book and the other characters and time frames were far less intriguing.

Unfortunately, there were numerous story-lines and several different narrators that resulted in a disjointed, and frequently confusing, mess of a story. The reader jumps around so much that it is difficult to get attached to most of the characters, and engagement in the plot is delayed for the majority of the book as a consequence.
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Favorite Quote: Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.

First Sentences: My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.