Everything Is Illuminated

This book.I love to read; I try to do a book a week. I have a rule that I have to finish any book I start.This book has an interesting format but is really hard to follow. I feel I needed someone to give me the summary of the book before I read it so I knew what the heck was going on.At about chapter 3, I had to calculate how many pages I had left and how many I had to read per day to get it done in 7 days because it was THAT hard.There’s a plot twist that kept me reading until the end, but I would absolutely refuse to read this again.

As others may have mentioned, some sections of the book are written in broken english, so if you are a stickler for grammar, you might want to pass. Likewise, you may want to look elsewhere if you have prudish tendencies, as some parts can get quite vulgar. You will, however, be missing out on a pleasant (-ly surprising, at least for me), engaging story. I hate spoilers, so I won't go into detail regarding the plot, but I can tell you that I found myself reading this book at every free moment, and had a difficult time putting it down. It's been some time since I've become so engrossed in a book.

3 narratives with such different voices in 1 book... I have read this twice and will be reading it again. The change in the first narrator’s language through the book is a key strength, and the grandfather characters in 2 of the narratives are such an interesting link.

Mini-Review of "Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran FoerAs I mentioned last month, my friend, Andy Peix, turned me on to the idiosyncratic writing style of Jonathan Safran Foer. Having been moved by "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," I knew I had to dig deep and read his first novel, "Everything is Illuminated."Foer has a gift for taking huge tragedies - 9/11 or the Holocaust - and distilling the horror of their aftermath into very personal journey taken by unforgettable characters. In this case, the protagonist - a fictional Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out on a journey to find a gentile woman who may have saved his grandfather form the Nazis. The fractured English of Alex, the young Ukrainian translator, highlights the absurdity of many of the situations that Alex and Jonathan find themselves in - accompanies by the ever-drooling and randy canine with the greatest name in all of literature: "Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior"! The writing is brilliant; the characters are memorable; the story is moving. Read it.Enjoy.Al

This book starts out hilarious. Several people didn't like the beginning, but I was reading it in public (on a bus, by a swimming pool) and laughing out loud in several parts. Yes, it is a bit sophomoric, but the young Ukranian narrator is so endearing and the situations he describes so hilarious. I actually liked the later parts of the book less and was often confused as to what was going on. Too many different literary styles and the ending was somewhat unsatisfactory.

It was an ok book. I liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close much better. This story was a bit hard to follow with 3 narrators, but then started making sense as you got into it. I liked Alex and his terrible use of the English thesaurus. I liked the stories about Alex and his Grandfather, and Jonathan's search, but didn't particularly like the stories about the past. It was a little too surreal in a book that I hoped to be more realistic. But I'm glad I read it.

The main character is named after the author, that's the first strange thing about this novel. Jonathan is taking a trip to Europe to try and find the woman who saved his Grandpa from the Nazis. The book's chapters alternate between Jonathan's ancestral back story, his trip to the Ukraine, and his subsequent correspondence with his travel guide Alex. I'm not sure, but I think the book's title comes from Jonathan's conclusion that things become illuminated when we see reality the way we would like to see it. I may be way off, but that was my take. I'd be interested in hearing how others interpret the novel.

The extravagant hype surrounding Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel serves only to create a camouflage of unreasonable expectations and subverts an extremely promising career beginning, a promise left as yet unfulfilled. Like Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" (but without her degree of tonal control), Mr. Foer writes beyond our expectations of one so young, and ambitiously, with humour and humanity.The novel, however, is wildly uneven, veering between cut-rate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, abbreviated William Styron and a witty lyricism all his own. The stabs at humour frequently become repetitious or fall flat and his experimental narrative constructions are only intermittently successful as well.But he gets full marks for effort and, when his writing works, as it frequently does, it is a joy to read. So if "Everything" is approached ignoring the hype, it has enough delights to reward your effort.