This book is hard to piece together. It's even harder to write about.

If Everything Is Illuminated had to be categorized onto one shelf, I'd assign it a spot alongside other books about the holocaust. Or maybe about love. No, it's about friendship. Scratch that...it's really about loneliness.

Whatever it actually is about, Jonathan Safran Foer seems to be too odd of a man, and definitely too odd of an author, to define the book or narrow its focus. The minute the reader does, Foer changes the tempo and direction of the book. Sometimes, the stories of cruelty are cover-your-eyes horrible. Sometimes, the situations are uncomfortably obscene. Sometimes, the story and characters are folklorist-y bizarre. Sometimes, it's modern-age hilarious. A lot of the time, it's furrow-your-brow confusing. Everything definitely did not get illuminated for me.

With broad, sweeping strokes, I'll attempt to give a basic summary of the book. A young 20 year-old Jewish man, whose name also happens to be Jonathan Safran Foer, travels to the Ukraine in an attempt to track down a woman in a photograph named Augustine, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. To help him, he hires a tour guide/translator named Alex, whose English appears to have been mostly learned directly from a thesaurus. The nouns and verbs he chooses are almost always slightly off, but kind of, sort of close, and the reader is forced to translate almost all of Alex's narrative into actual English. Part of the book is written as letters from Alex to Jonathan as explanations for his translations and editions. Some of it is what the character Jonathan Safran Foer writes as his novel (after his return from his trip) and some of it is narrative of the actual trip, given by Alex. When the parts are put together as a whole novel, the reader is forced to be quite patient and thorough to finish the book actually understanding all of what happened, and even more willing to be content with its loose ends that will never be tied.

While Alex's broken English can certainly be funny, it slows down the pace of the novel (because it's impossible to read it fast) too much. Thankfully, his conversational skills do improve and his letters to Jonathan towards the end are much more accessible. Additionally, because both Alex and Jonathan are young and male, there is quite a bit of sexual humor that turns out to be quite harmless, and even slightly endearing, but still makes the overall effect a bit R-rated.

There are so many characters to keep track of and I'm not exactly certain if I figured out who was who and if they mattered. Ultimately, I think most didn't matter because, again, I think the take-home message is meant to be about the horrors of the holocaust and how good people can do bad things. If not, then I missed a whole lot.

If you do attempt this book, read it patiently. It might help to read it as part of a group effort. Then, perhaps if you're able to talk it through and everyone brings their own understanding into a collective whole, everything about this novel might actually BECOME illuminated.

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.

Alternates between being absolutely hilarious and completely heartbreaking. The hilariousity comes courtesy of narrator Alex, who is a Ukranian tour guide hired to guide a young man (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) to a village where his grandfather was saved from the Nazis by a woman named Augustine. Along for the ride is Alex's grandfather (he's the driver, but insists that he's blind and "I'm supposed to be retarded!") and his seeing eye dog, referred to by Alex as the "seeing-eye bitch." Alex's English makes the book worth reading. With Alex, things aren't good, they're "premium." People don't chew, they "masticate." And he often "goes to famous nightclubs and dispenses currency." His English mysteriously improves whenever the plot needs to be serious, but I didn't have a problem with this.
The other parts of the story focus on the history of the town where Jonathan Safran Foer's grandfather will eventually be saved, and here the writing style reminded me a lot of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some parts of it were funny, but mostly, it was very, very depressing.
All in all, a wonderful book, and Foer gets maximum points for writing as two completely different narrators, and doing both very well.

There is saying that war is never good, peace is never bad.

This is what I was reminded of as I read through this nearly perfect book. Etched in memory is how those who survived the Holocaust are still living with their stories. Tales to tell so that the world never forgets what was done to them.

Time is a capsule in this book as narratives are switched and three stories travel back and forth across centuries.
As we embark on this journey, the protagonist leaves on a quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Everything is Illuminated is about the horrific tales of the atrocities of Nazi invasion & the mass extermination of towns and races, about one such sole survivor in an uninhabited town picking collectibles from the remains. The writing captures the betrayal, guilt and love which is unpeeled before our eyes.
This book is incredibly quotable and will intermittently make you laugh and cry and feel the tenderness of love. It holds so much between its pages that it’s almost impossible to truly express how it beautiful and heart wrenching it is in mere paltry words.

Thank you Jonathan for gifting me three of the most beautiful characters ever, whose tenderness and pain has altered me forever. Thank you for gifting me the story of Brod, a girl who’s a genius in sadness. Who discovered 13 forms of sadnesses and whose life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

I think Jonathan Safron Foer (sp?)is greatly overrated.

I felt like he was constantly saying, "ooh, aren't i smart, isn't that clever? do you like that?" he was too close to his material somehow.

I also felt compelled after reading this to do some writing of my own. His voice is being heard, now, where's a voice that i feel speaks for me, for my experience. hopefully that will yet happen!

tt

It makes me really sad that Jonathan Safran Foer's books are held in such high regard and esteem but they always seem to miss the mark for me. I don't know if it's me or him!!! This book was very confusing and all over the place. Sometimes it was speaking from a memory of the grandfather, sometimes it was in the grandson's point of view, and sometimes it was the boy travelling with them who spoke another language. It was hard to keep track of. One day I may give it another chance to see if I like it better.

When JSF was a freshman at Princeton he took Intro to Writing with JCO (Joyce Carol Oates). She told him he possessed the most important trait a writer can have: energy. I guess I can see the evidence of that in this, his first novel, published when he was only 25. It was based on real-life research he had done in the Ukraine trying to find the woman in an old family picture who helped is grandfather escape the Nazis. He put a fictionalized wrapper around all this that bundled not only the family history, but tales about life in the shtetl, an account narrated by his young Ukrainian translator (Alex), and the correspondence between them. The writing was usually pretty lively no matter whether it was JSF or Alex at the helm. The switching between them kept the pace spritely as well. But with all this energy, something else was lacking. It falls under the more mundane category of editing.

First, there were the gimmicks. There was nothing inherently wrong with them, I just didn’t feel like they were very well-executed. The fact that JSF himself was a character in the novel was a contrivance, but understandable. At least he could write convincingly from that particular point of view. His Ukrainian counterpart, though, Alex, was not as plausible. His narration was meant to be funny, replete with idiomatic inventions and not-quite-right synonyms. For instance, he would close each correspondence with “Guilelessly” rather than “Sincerely.” Actually, that was one of the better ones. Others were more far-fetched, and the repetition got old. That was part of an overall inconsistency in tone, sort of like if a classically trained violinist tried to play hillbilly-style every third or fourth measure.

Good editing could have helped in a few other areas, too. For instance, the sex scenes in the early days of the shtetl didn’t ring true, pre-dating by many years movies like Long Dong Silver where the outlandishness might have been more fitting. The stories, in general, were sort of inane. Then there was an extreme case of Deus ex machina to explain how Alex’s grandfather, who was the putatively blind driver in this investigation, connected to the people they met. Foer was also criticized for overstating the part Ukrainians played in abetting the Nazis in the actual historical event at Trochenbrod (which was the model for his story).

I’m sure Foer is a real talent. My feeling with this one, though, is that he had no one in his corner telling him anything other than how great he was. He’s probably matured since then, as have his people, and the editing is bound to have improved. Can anyone who’s read any of his later books confirm this?

Afterthought: For a much better Holocaust story with a twist, try The Complete Maus.

1 Star

This review contains spoilers. They are not hidden because I feel people should be forewarned about this book.

Can I give a book zero stars?? Because there was not a single thing that I liked or even could tolerate about Everything is Illuminated. This just might make my top ten worst books I have ever read list.

The premise sounded good: a young man going to the Ukraine to find out what his grandfather went through during WWII and ending up going through his own journey of self discovery. It was supposed to be loosely inspired by Foer's own journey. I expected an emotional, culturally rich historical fiction. It was short; I thought I would be able to read it in a weekend. Instead I had to drag myself through it.

I immediately had no idea what was going on. Far from anything being illuminated, things just got murkier. It felt more like having a sack thrown over my head, being shoved into a van, driven around by a maniac, then having said maniac demand I provide detailed directions for the route he just drove. This book was a colossal mess! The characters were all obnoxious. The plot was chaotic disaster. And the author put so much effort into trying to make impressive stylized writing that he forgot to actually write the book.

After much confusion, I did at least figure out the the story had three segments. The first is the main events of the story narrated by young local, Alex, who is supposed to be acting as guide to the main character. His sections were the most over the top in terms of desperately trying to be original and hyperbolized stylization (which just turned into bombastic mangling of the English language). It felt like maybe, those were supposed to be some comic relief, but it was mostly just exhausting.

The second thread is the main character, Jonathan Safran Foer, writing a heavily fictionalized family history. This was very confusing because most of it was about several generations ago starting in 1791 and not about his grandfather as the synopsis would lead one to believe. In fact WWII was barely even mentioned until about half way through the book. The other very confusing part, if you did not catch it is that the main character has the exact same name as the author. No, it is not a memoir or even an embellished truth. Apparently Jonathan(the author) did take a trip to the Ukraine to find out about his family history but did not learn anything and certainly did not experience the events that Jonathan (the character) did in this book. So what was the point?? How preposterously pretentious do you have to be to write a fictional version of yourself still with your exact name? And then go so far as to having the fictional narrator constantly refer to your fictional self as "The Hero"? I was literally cringing as I read this book.

The third thread are letters from Alex to Jonathan (the character) discussing Jonathan's (the character) weird writing about ancestors. These letters are written after the events of the main story. They are filled with Alex's simpering gushes about how great Jonathan (the character) was and how great his writing was. Again, with the nauseating self-importance of Jonathan (the author). There are no responses included from Jonathan (the character); only Alex's side of the conversation is represented. The other annoying thing about those sections was that they went beyond foreshadowing to outright telling what was going to happen in the main story. Then you have live through the chaotic retelling of it knowing exactly how it would turn out.

I did not like a single character in this book. Between the pompousness, the vulgarity, and the pandemonium of the plot, I just wanted it all to end. Jonathan (the character AND the author) was annoying. Alex was a ridiculous unreliable narrator. The grandfather was just weird. I initially felt some sympathy for Brod but quickly lost that under the growing suspicion that she just might have been sociopath and was at the very least extremely unstable.

This book is full of disturbing vulgarity and sexual crudeness. Not just swearing and sexual analogies but horrible sexual acts. I could not stand the pages and pages describing a twelve-year-old being objectified, lusted after by "every man in the village," and molested. Then it implies her rape at age thirteen followed by years of more disturbing sexual acts. I mean, who the hell puts a glory hole in their house?? And it makes it even more disconcerting when you think that those things were written by Jonathan (the author) writing as Jonathan (the character) both writing about their great-grandmother's sexual acts. And none of it seemed to have any point other than shock value.

There were many historical anachronisms, no richness of historical detail, no true emotion, and no real humor. On top of that, this book had some of the worst dialogue I have ever read. Much of it was done in paragraph. The sections of the fictionalized family history had the dialogue in italics for some random reason and no quotation marks. Alex's sections had the dialogue crammed together in paragraph back to back without saying how was saying what. So it just clumped together into this huge mess. Most of those conversations were between Jonathan (the character) and Alex in English and then between Alex and his grandfather in Russian (although these parts were written out in English as well). So it resulted in these huge run-on conversations all stuffed into single paragraphs. I was going to include an example, but I just cannot bring myself to type it all out.

Unfortunately, I do not understand what was supposed to be emotionally moving about this story. Yes, the scene at the climax in and of itself was tragic but it felt as chaotic and poorly written as the rest of the story. You can tell it was supposed to be this profound illuminating twist (and obviously it was to a lot of other readers given the high ratings and gushing praise), but it left me feeling nauseated and utterly repulsed. It felt like an exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of fleshing out the book and purposefully trying to manipulate people's emotions.

I admit I had to skim so parts. It was that or completely DNF it. If this book had not been given to me, I would most certainly not have finished it. It was terrible in its entirety. The whole book felt pretentious and was a study in trying waaaaay too hard to be artsy. It was disturbing. It glorified vulgarity. It was written by someone who apparently thinks themselves far more clever than they actually are. Jonathan (the author) was trying so hard to be clever and witty and the result was a disorganized, disturbing disaster. Usually I try not to bash authors even when I do not like the book, but given the whole making-yourself-a-fictional-character-and-having-the-narrator-call-you-The-Hero thing, I do not feel the least bit guilty about it.

I would not recommend this book to a single person. Ever.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 1 Star
Writing Style: 1 Star
Characters: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 1 Star
Level of Captivation: 1 Star
Originality: 1 Star

I am so conflicted by this book. There is at its core an interesting and moving story - actually two such stories. But it's hard not to feel that it's all so contrived - the whimsical structure, wavy heading text, constantly switching style and viewpoint, excessive use of italics and uppercase, endearing little side stories, fableist story-telling, larger than life characters (with sometimes grating idiosyncrasies), lucky coincidences - all of this trickery was laid on just a little too thick for my liking, and left me feeling a little wary of the thing the whole way through. But to leave it at that would be a little unfair: there is quite a good book in here. I imagine it could have been a lot more powerful if distilled to something told a little more simply, but then perhaps it would have lost some of its youthful flamboyant charm. To my surprise I'm giving it four stars, but only barely.

If I haven't laid out my good-book-philosophy yet, then I'll do it here. It needs to be done some time, or else any reviews I write would be somewhat out of context. So, here goes:

To me, there are two main parts, or aspects, of a book. One is the story, and the other is the way it is written. When I say "story", I mean everything that happens in the book, as it would happen in real life (or some other life, in sci-fi), while the "way it is written" is, of course, the words that are chosen to describe these things and happenings, and their particular relationship with each other.

It is my [strong] opinion that any really good book not be lacking at all in the writing category, because a story by itself is just a campfire tale or a Jerry Bruckheimer production. I have a collection of old Irish short stories, and the early ones are all like this; they were made to be told, by a trained storyteller, to groups of people on cold winter evenings. Yeah, you hear about some interesting people and interesting things happen to them, but they're stuck in some sort of one-dimensional, ambiguity-free world. So, if the writing's no good, even the best story in the world will only earn three stars (case in point: Da Vinci Code, not even to imply it has the best story in the world, but it does have a good one.

Tilting the scales the other way, all I remember from the first time I
read Catcher in the Rye was that Holden got kicked out of school [again] and subsequently went home to New York and wandered around for a while. That's hardly a story, in the classical sense. Can you imagine telling the story of Holden Caulfied to a cabinful of people on a chilly January night? I can, and all the people would be asleep, or maybe they'd be gone, having a nip or vodka at someone else's house before tucking in. What I'm trying to say is that, even though there is a story in Catcher in the Rye, it's not an incredibly strong one. And yet it's the greatest book ever written (that I've read). Not once in J.D. Salinger's masterpiece do I find myself wanting to know what happens next, contrary to Dan Brown's perpetual "where's the GRAIL?!?" and any of the generally despicable "crime" genre, "who done it?". Salinger always lives in the moment, telling you what is happening without building it up into some sort of Rocky vs. Drago scene. That's good writing; I want to read it, not skip ahead to know the ending. That brings me to another point: if knowing the ending "ruins" a book, the book has bad writing. Salinger dedicates CITR to the "casual reader", if he exists (in 1955, presumably), because he reads when he has time, for enjoyment, and not to get to the end of the book. I was disappointed the second time I read CITR, last year, because it didn't just keep going. Salinger is perfect for casual readers, because nearly every page can be seen as a contextless example of good writing.

But enough talking up of Salinger [, who's a genius]. My next example
is Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Very good writing. But the story gets in the way. It's a shame, because I'd like to hear more about what the kid (I have forgotten his name) has to say about a lot more stuff. JSF keeps hanging that "to what lock does this key belong" question in front of us. And some of the interstitial/backstory chapters are slightly off the mark and distracting, sometimes because those stories were too complicated and I couldn't keep all of the characters straight.

But what he did wrong in Extremely Loud, his second novel, he somehow managed to get, spot on, in his first, Everything is Illuminated. This book changed my entire perspective of novels, because I was starting to believe that a "good" (i.e. exciting, mysterious, goal-oriented) story cannot be paired with good writing without overshadowing it. Nope, JSF existed in some parallel dimension where this pairing is possible when he wrote Everything is Illuminated. The most powerful character by far is the Ukrainian guide (I forgot his name, too), and somewhere between his interactions with the "hero" (named Jonathan Safran Foer; I remembered that one), the letters he writes later, and the observations he makes on every aspect of the story, are nothing short of amazing. And then JSF includes, in between "main plot" chapters and the guide's letters, a wonderfully surreal (and surreality is perhaps the best quality of JSF's writing, that I have seen so far) historical recount dating back some 200+ years, of which I never tired of reading.

Two observations that earn this book five stars: I enjoyed reading the book immensely without wanting to skip ahead, and at the end of the book my jaw was hanging open and I wanted to cry [just a bit]. Writing: check. Story: check. Do the writing and story play nicely with each other?: check.

Five stars.

As a final note, and not to take away from the unbelieveable
awesomeness of Everything is Illuminated, but I don't feel like
reading it again. I'm not surprised, because Catcher in the Rye is the
only book I've ever read more than once, but I have to think about why
I don't want to read Everything is Illuminated again, other than
simply wanting to read other books instead. I want to read Salinger
(any of them) over and over again. Let's just say that in a
Salinger-less world, JSF would be on top, but here in this world, this
is not the case.

Everything is Illuminated is awesome. Read it.

"The world is the smallest thing."

I have been hearing about Jonathan Safran Foer for ages, and he is one of those authors I keep meaning to read and somehow never quite manage to get around to. I decided to break this bad habit of always skipping him and tackled his debut, “Everything is Illuminated” with some reservation. I had heard a lot about the unusual structure of this book, the postmodernist trope of the author including himself in his narrative and all that; that kind of stuff doesn’t exactly annoy me, but it does make me feel like patting the book on the head and reassure it that, yes, it is very, clever, good boy.

I ended up enjoying "Everything is Illuminated" a lot more than my cynicism had predicted I would: the story is sweet, funny, heartbreaking and moving, but I also found it rather self-conscious - which I suppose makes sense as it was Foer's debut novel.

A young man named Jonathan Safran Foer travels to Ukraine, looking for the woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis during WWII. He hires Alex as a translator, and Alex's grandfather as a driver: little does Jonathan know that Alex's English is not exactly up to par, and that his grandfather will only drive around with his crazy female dog (named Sammy David Junior, Junior) in the backseat and that no one in Ukraine seems to understand the concept of vegetarianism. But the trip will prove to be much more interesting and rewarding than he could have planned. Told alternatively in Alex's broken English, in letters he wrote to Jonathan after his journey and in the history of his grandfather's village that Jonathan is working on, this novel makes for a constantly surprising and often rather strange story.

As I was reading, I was reminded of Nicole Krauss' (Foer's ex-wife) "The History of Love" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which was her debut novel and has a similar narrative structure of three different voices woven together to make a story about loss, memory and intimacy. The two books might as well come as a set, his and hers. This was a good and entertaining read, but I think I preferred hers.

--

Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of the brilliant gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello (one of the best live musical acts I have ever seen) plays Alex in the movie adaptation, and as I read, I kept picturing his amazing face and stage presence. I have to find the movie, because I kept humming this as I read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3SUP...

Tiresome and overblown. Some really good lines, though.

Overall, it wasn't worth the energy to insult...it wasn't good enough to enjoy and praise...it's one of those cases where I simply do not care.

If you're familiar with my taste, and share it, you're not going to be sorry for passing this one up. Tedious, lumpen thing. I've eaten gnocchi with more savor.