This is one of those books that I just couldn't wait for it to be over. I didn't care for it. It was so incredibly incredibly focused on ONE thing. Because of that singular laser focus, there seemed to be a lot of missed opportunities to create something memory worthy.

I struggled to finish this one. This was really 1 star for me, but I did add a star for Alex. He kept me in and he made me smile from time to time. So 2 stars seems fair.

‘Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does’

I adore this book. It's original, funny and touching. After many years since reading it I still find myself thinking about parts of it. It's definitely a book to be read and reread.

Overhyped, yess. But the embedded bits of brilliance are worthwhile. The play of language is what I'm most interested in here, more than the meditations on loss, holocaust, and history's shadow of brutality, personal (micro) history intersecting with, building, and being torn apart by, macro history. Those elements are there, yes.
But Alex's play of language, it goes on even in the midst of disaster. Yeah, it's a metaphor for the difficulty of all cultural, and thus personal, understanding and communication. Sometimes it's too damned clever. Sometimes you wake up your neighbors laughing.

And to give context--I was given this book by a woman I fell for during a particularly chaotic phase of both of our lives. She had had some considerable trouble in this culture, and was returning to the place she'd come from; thus the book. And she shares Foer's ability to look at something with total openness, to make suffering and insight and quotidian things alike fucking light up with the fire of understanding. And what we never accomplished in, physical communication, we did in letters, in messages: despite the difficulties of culture and language, it happened in words. As it does in Foer's novel.

So what I love about this book has only something to do with the book, and more with the process of communication itself, with language, and how I fell in love with it once again, with eyes open, knowing the pain and the risk.

2.5 stars.

Everything is Illuminated is the tale of a young writer traveling to eastern Europe in order to find a woman named Augustine. It is a tale about a young woman named Brod, and her battle with and against love and sadness. It is supposedly a heart-wrenching tale that ties together past and present, and inevitably illuminates everything.

The experimental writing style of this book was its strength. If one enjoyed it, one liked the book. If one didn't, one didn't like the book. I was apathetic toward the entire novel - sure, the pathos pulled me in a few times, and yes, I laughed at Alex's humor, but I didn't love anything. There were some brilliant tidbits, but at times it felt like Foer was trying too hard to be inspirational.

Recommended to fans of historical fiction and books written in a unique way. Also, to fans of malapropism. I highly recommend Everything is Illuminated to fans of malapropism.

Here's one passage I liked:

The beach was beautiful last night, but this did not surprise me. I love sitting on the edge of the land and feeling the water verge me, and then leave me. Sometimes I remove my shoes and put my feet where I think the water will approach to. I have attempted to think about America in regard to where I am on the beach. I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

*review cross-posted on my blog, the quiet voice.

Her şey Aydınlandı, yarı otobiyografik bir eser. Yazar Jonathan Safran Foer’in bizzat karakterlerden biri olarak karşımıza çıktığı roman, Foer’in İkinci Dünya Savaşı’ndan karısı ve çocuğunu arkasında, Ukrayna’da bırakıp, bir arkadaşının yardımıyla ABD’ye kaçarak burada yeni bir hayat kuran dedesinin geçmişinin peşine düşmesiyle gelişen olayları anlatıyor. Bu yolculukta Foer’e rehberlik ve çevirmenlik yapan, Ukraynalı bir genç, Alex’in de eşlik etmesiyle, kurgunun büyük bölümünü bu yol hikayesi ile ikilinin mektuplaşmaları oluşturuyor. Bir yandan da Foer, birkaç asır öncesinden başlayarak, o zaman Ukrayna’nın bir köyünde yaşayan ailesinin hikayesini, dönemin inançları, yaşayışları ve çekilen acıları da dahil ettiği, Marquez’in anımsatan şekilde gerçeküstü unsurlarla bezeli bir masal tadında anlatıyor.

Konu oldukça tanıdık aslında ama hikayenin aktarılma şekli romanı çok özel bir yere taşıyor. Postmodern edebiyatın en iyi ve yaratıcı örneklerinden biri bana göre. Foer kurgu içinde kurgu tekniğiyle iç içe geçmiş iki hikayeyi (Foer’in ailesinin kuşaklar öncesinde Ukrayna’nın bir köyünde başlayan hikayesi ve günümüzde geçen, dedesinin geçmişinin peşine düşmesinin hikayesi) iki anlatıcıyla aktarırken, zamanın bükülmesi aracılığıyla da adeta klasik romanda her şeyi bilen Tanrı anlatıcının rolünü üstlenen bir yazar karakter olarak kendini kurguya dahil ediyor. Teleskopla uzaya bakıp, şimdiki eylemlerinin yansımalarını asırlar sonrasında, farklı mekanlarda görme metaforu -romandaki diğer birçok metafor gibi- çok başarılıydı. Böyle dâhiyane inşa edilmiş kurguyla, tarihten kimsenin elinin temiz çıkmadığını, tarihin aslında elimizdeki bu kirin sürekli kendini farklı zaman ve mekanlarda tekrarlamasından başka bir şey olmadığını ve bizim de bu gerçekle yüzleşip yine de yaşamaya devam etmek zorunda olduğumuzu gösteriyor. Foer’in zekasına ve yaratıcılığına hayran kaldım. Romanı sadece 21 yaşında kaleme aldığını öğrenmek ayrıca heyecanlandırdı beni. Postmodern edebiyat seviyorsanız mutlaka tavsiye ederim.

All'inizio, non ci capivo una mazza... poi proseguendo nella lettura ho cominciato a trovare i fili da seguire e questo scoprire il libro pian piano mi è piaciuto molto. Questo racconto è tenero, malinconico, cinico, buffo, straziante... insomma, un bel problema tirarne fuori una recensione con i dovuti crismi. Nonostante alcune pecche narrative, è un libro che ti porta in un'altra dimensione, da cui poi è difficile staccarsi e pur trattando un tema forte come l'olocausto la lettura rimane leggera, quasi sospesa. Credo che Foer non sia un autore da mezze misure, ma una volta entrati in confidenza con la sua scrittura è difficile non amarlo. Ho trovato bellissime pagine di poesia, descrizioni di stati d'animo, inserite quasi a caso nel racconto, che hanno dato un tocco di magia alla storia.
E alla fine, chissà se Alex c'è poi andato in America...

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum".
One of the beautiful quote from the book.

But the book, What the .........................
I really don't know what to say actually about this book. As written on the book cover (work of a genius) ok i admit it is.
But Did I love this book or i hate it at maximum? Gone through different feelings of love, anger, hate, happiness, pain, fun but I just got headache every time I read it and that's the reason for ending it too late and reading other books between this time period. Many times I feel sick while reading and with the start of another chapter I feel energetic and alive. That's how the whole book is.......
A unique combination of beautiful and shitty things all going one after another alongwith complicated events of the war. Moreover the letters of Alex for Jonathan written in the book is another mind using tactic. Few chapters and phrases are so excellent and deep that you are forced to immersed in the magic of the writer while other are so digusting that you just want to hit your head with something.
Why Jonathan
whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
why
that's what I was saying while reading those filthy chapters. I mean how could one think of a story like this. A grandfather having 68 affairs with his dead arm and still don't know what's love. Whats the purpose of writing that part??? Seriously that's intolerable.....
The only part I like, Sasha with his grandfather alongwith the hero (Jonathan) in the search of Augustine. And I hate the part of Brod, Kokler & yankel.

Not every book is for everyone and this one is definitely not for me......
Apart from the fact I like it or not but that's seriously not an easy book to write.
2 stars for the parts I like and for that intricate work of a genius but still I dislike most of the parts..

Devo dire che è un libro particolare, non so ancora dire se mi è piaciuto o no. All'inizio stavo per abbandonare la lettura, non ci capivo niente, poi ho insistito e sono andata avanti. E' sicuramente originale, ironico e commovente contemporeaneamente.Bisogna abituarsi alla narrazione "a due", con da un lato il tono ironico di Alex, che mima un inglese scritto da un ucraino, dall'altro il tono più serio di Jonathan. Comunque la storia è drammaticamente bella e difficile da dimenticare.

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.

Bah!
Dove dovrebbe far ridere riesce solo ad irritare e dove la storia e i personaggi e i dialoghi dovrbbero facilmente far piangere riesce a malapena ad annoiare, ma non del tutto: un po' irrita pure.
Insomma, un romanzo sbagliato in tutto e per tutto.
O sono sbagliato io, in tal caso mi rimetto alla volontà popolare e ammetto di non essere all'altezza di cotanto genio e buonanotte.

Sometimes reading makes me so angry

Dammit.

I’m a freaking mess. I realize this and I accept it.

Ugh.

Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this to me? And why the hell are you so young? I know that some call you gimmicky and think that you are just a phosphoresce in the pannikin (yes, I, too, have access to Thesaurus.com) but I just…just…spleen them. They can read their Anderson and their Coetzee and leave us dreamers alone. I am ‘Team Foer’; others be damned. (I still wish you weren’t so freaking young, though)

The story is fragmented, told through letters and hodgepodges of writings that might or might not be parts of a novel. There is the story about the people of Trachimbrod, which might be Trochenbrod, a city in western Ukraine that was decimated during WWII by a Nazi Invasion. There is the story of Alex and Jonathan and their journey to find out Who is Augustine?  And to thank her for saving Jonathan’s lineage. There is the story of Grandfather and Herschel (copious amounts of tears during that one).

And then there are the stories within the stories. The story of Brod, Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother and her struggle with loving the idea of love and her 613 sadnesses ( “Mirror Sadness”, “Sadness of not knowing if your body is normal”, “Beauty Sadness”, “Sadness of Hands”, “Sadness of knowing that your body is normal”, “Kissing Sadness”, “Sadness of wanting sadness”, “Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things”, What if? Sadness”, “Sadness”, “Secret Sadness.”)

The story of the would-be ‘Augustine’ and her house with its many labeled boxes ( ‘Silver/Perfume/Pinwheels’, ‘Watches/Winter’, ‘Darkness’, ‘Pillowcases’, ‘Poetry/Nails/Pisces’, ‘Dust’, 'Menorahs/Inks/Keys', 'Death of a Firstborn', 'In Case')

I loved them all. I love the awakenings and the not-truths. I love the humor and the tragedies and the friendships. I am giddy and heavy hearted. I am in love with the idea.

What I loved most, what I clung to after I finished the book, was this:

Jews have Six Senses
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing….memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and see memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain---that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.
When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks “What does it remember like?”

The idea of memory as a sense. Okay, I’ve admitted it before and will again and again. I’m a shiksa—a French-Canadian/German/NH bred—Shiksa. I can’t fathom the horrors of having the Holocaust in my past, I won’t even begin to pretend to imagine the ramifications. But I can appreciate this idea: “What does it remember like?” Aren’t we all tied to the past? Aren’t all of our future actions predetermined by a memory? “Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”

So much for Free Will.

At one point, Alex begs Jonathan when writing their story: “I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.”

We have that power in writing. To take away the bad and to recreate. We usually choose not to. It has to be gritty…fairytales are for the young…we need to set the story straight… we need to exorcise our demons….and so on. Make us good. God, that just about killed me.

And this is why I will always defend Foer. His ability to bring me to this awareness and to break my heart in 300 pages or less.

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.