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Aug 23, 2011

Kim rated it:

~~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 F More...

21 comments like (100 people liked it)

Oct 04, 2011

Matthieu rated it:

After a while, you get so old,

148 comments like (31 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Mike rated it:

I watched the movie of this first and loved it. It was basically a movie about cultural misunderstanding and how people can be cruel without really knowing it. It is a story about what happens when you put an American and someone born out of the Soviet era in the same room and try to make them explain to one another why the other one thinks the way they do. In a word: hilarious.

After reading the book, I still like the movie, but it seems obvious to me that the filmmakers missed th More...

6 comments like (56 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2009

Bram rated it:

Everything Is Illuminated is one of the most focused books I’ve read. It doesn’t meander inappropriately, and there’s almost no excess. Seriously, this book’s got less fat than Christian Bale in The Machinist. It's either in full-on comedy mode, full-on fanciful mode, full-on drama mode, or some well-balanced combination of the three. Foer spent years editing the novel from his initial college thesis draft, and it shows—in a good way. There's no lag, and given some of the other books I was More...

19 comments like (33 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2008

Robert rated it:

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Dutton, 2002)

My, what a clever novel!

In any case, that, I imagine, is what Jonathan Safran Foer kept saying as he was writing this. And really, much about it is clever. The comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are completely unwarranted, as Alex, Foer's Ukrainian hero, destroys the English language in a quite different way than does Burgess' Alex. (A less politically correct but more conceptually accurate comparison would be Charl More...

4 comments like (36 people liked it)

Jan 11, 2012

Brian rated it:

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, More...

3 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jul 02, 2009

Beth rated it:

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0 comments like (17 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Nils rated it:

I could go on and on about how what is clever at 25 grows less so as we age, about how metafiction resonates more with young men who have yet to face the issues that do have enduring meaning in life (durational love, children, divorce, death), about how tapping into the Holocaust for emotional weight seems increasingly to be cheating. But enough. There are already mixed reviews that discuss the limits of this novel. Read those. Smart but not especially emotionally or psychologically interest More...

1 comment like (11 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Nathan rated it:

The gut-tickling malaprop voice of Alex, bragging falsely (but without a trace of guile) in a broken idiolect that suggests computer translation gone awry, is worth the price of admission all by itself. Sadly, the rest of the book -- much of it strung out in unimaginative flashback episodes -- is a turgid, half-baked mess. Reading just Alex's bits and ignoring the rest would be a bit like picking out all the chocolate chips from a bag of trailmix...but that may be the best way to snack here.

1 comment like (12 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Ben rated it:

Sorry but I didn't care for this at all. If Mr. Nobody wrote a book about himself as the main character, and used some uninventive malapropisms to make discussions with a foreigner amusing, the book would be tossed. But wait, Foer went to Yale. Unfortunately for me the quality of his writing shows me that nepotism will always beat out merit these days. Sorry to be harsh, but really, I found the writing to be quite poor.

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2012

Kua rated it:

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 legge More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 23, 2011

Jim rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

May 03, 2008

Graeme rated it:

This gets an extra star for a truly funny gag that carries the book for the first fifty or sixty pages. That's surprising and impressive mileage for a simple bit (the narrator, a non-native English speaker, relies heavily on a thesaurus, so that "a hard journey" is "a rigid journey"), but after it wears off -- grinding agony.

Foer wants to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his magic is insipid and his realism is lazily dishonest. He consistently goes for an easy lie More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jun 03, 2008

Lucy rated it:

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 doe More...

7 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jun 14, 2008

Jule rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 21, 2008

Heidi rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2008

Martine rated it:

I'm not sure how I feel about this, one of the most overhyped novels of the early noughties. On the one hand, it undeniably contains flashes of genius. It is original, inventive and ambitious, which is great. On the other hand, it has a few aspects which annoyed me, and that, I think, is less good.

In a nutshell, Everything Is Illuminated is an amalgam of three interconnected stories. The first is that of a young Jewish American (bearing the same name as the author) who visits the Ukr More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

ElizaBeth rated it:

I was in pain from laughing so much during the first part of this book. I've never enjoyed a "non-native" English speaker's writing so much. Although it gets less funny and more serious as it progresses, and it occasionally treads on the unclear / confusing side of things, I think that's just part of it: you aren't supposed to fully understand everything that's happening. All in all, one of the most memorable books I've read in a while.

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Feb 28, 2007

Tova rated it:

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

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2008

Elaine rated it:

Mixed feelings about this novel. Overall, I liked it and would recommend it to any fan of literary fiction, Jewish history, history in general, and genealogy. It's very different from the film, which slices out at least one-half of the novel: the backstory. The film is a well-done "road movie" set in the Ukraine and following the three main characters, Alex, Alex's grandfather Sasha, and Jonathan, as they search for the elusive town of Trachimbrod. The novel, however, is less focused o More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2007

Adam rated it:

I had tried to read this in 2005 and dropped it after chapter two because of the irritatingly eleven-out-of-ten faux-quaint yiddish-eccentric overdrive of the sections set in Foer's grandmother's shtetl. But then I saw the film and fell in love with Alexi-stop-spleening-me, the film's narrator, and I thought I'd give the book another go. By this time I'd read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as well, and enjoyed it, so I was more favourably disposed to Foer.

I got further the secon More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2007

Emily rated it:

I disliked the character named "Jonathan Safran Foer" and I cannot stand when authors make themselves the heroes of fiction. You made up the story, you can't make up a name for the character? The ESL narrator Alex is the reason I like the book at all. He probably would have been even better if I hadn't seen Borat. He writes like Borat speaks, especially in the beginning of the book. But he is generous and grows emotionally, whereas JSF is snide and self-involved. It seems to me that ma More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Mar 30, 2007

jesse rated it:

Sure, JSF was overhyped and I shouldn't blame him for that. Sure, for a 23 year old, I suppose EiI is pretty remarkable, and yes, it moved me now and then. But literature is not a dog show. I shouldn't have to say to myself, "Well, isn't it amazing that he was only 23 when he wrote this?"

Secondly, I caught on to his shtick early on. Throughout the entire book, when he is not patting his alter ego on the back for being so tortured and brilliant, JSF basically passes off as More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Melanie rated it:

Wow...I heard great things about this book, and have read it twice. You will laugh so hard you'll cry during the first page. This book is my #2 favorite of all time. You get sucked into the characters and their surroundings, which alternates between modern Ukraine, WWII-era Ukraine and a third time period that I can only describe as fantastical, magical and sad, sad, sad. Remember the first time you read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and you wished you could slow down your reading More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 23, 2011

Bells rated it:

if you can see from someone's comments, it took me awhile to get through this book. No, it's not war and peace. I found it amusing in some parts and others were kind of slow for me... the humor is warped, but i like that in an author!

I believe this was his first novel - and I have to give him props for that - a solid effort.

I enjoyed it, but not enough to read it straight thru. other books got in the way... I have this book problem, you see.

Hey, I can quit an More...

11 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 06, 2008

Dave rated it:

The first time I picked up this book, it was difficult to get into. I put it down for a while, read a couple other books, and when I picked it back up again, for some reason it clicked. Everytime Foer switched narritives, I didn't want them to end, only to start another one that I didn't want to end. As far as Foer's writtings are concerned, I liked 'Extremely Loud' better, but stll would recomend this book to anyone. It's late. I'm going to bed now.

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 16, 2009

Jesse rated it:

"These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love."

The quote is worth the weight of the book, that at times is an absurdist rendition of a Jewish stetl attempting to prove that even the Holocaust can be postmodern and jaunty, and at times a tear-jerker, confused about where it's going and where it's been, similar to your lead characters Alex, Jonathan and Alex Sr. Even Sammy Davis Junior Junior, a deranged "officious seeing eye bitch" seems to be unsure of her footing in More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Oct 08, 2011

Melinda rated it:

why can't you give a book ZERO or even NEGATIVE stars?

I don't care if I don't garner a lot of "helpful" reviews here... I just need to vent. JSF is nobody. I HATE his writing style and he doesn't get extra points for only being 25 when we published this. The story of Bume is lifted STRAIGHT out of the story of Remedious the Beauty from 100 Years of Solitude, and he even uses the same literary trick by naming everyone the same name (fortunately, they all have stupid nickname More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 23, 2011

Joselito rated it:

A show off. He even named one of his characters Jonathan Safran Foer.

It is like he sees Haruki Murakami juggling five bowling pins and he says he can do that too, so he juggles five bowling pins with ease. Then he sees Ernest Hemingway juggling ten bowling pins and he says he can do that too so he juggles ten bowling pins and he even smiles while doing it. Then he sees Gabriel Garcia Marquez juggling fifteen bowling pins and he says he can do that too, and he does it. Then somebody s More...

6 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2010

Jeremy rated it:

There are two of my favorite famous type peeps born in the same year as myself: Jonathan Safran Foer and Tom Brady. At the same age as myself these two have accomplished things that make me both happy and a bit wondering what the hell I did wrong? How did I not publish 3 books by this age? How did I not win 3 superbowls or sporting equivalents? And both have been rewarded maganimously for their efforts. And both have earned their fair share of haters.

I read this with much ant More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)