About this title: A writer journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Passionate and marked by an indelible humanity, "Everything Is Illuminated" mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching: for people and places that no longer exist and for the tales that link past and future.
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 8/23/2005
ISBN-13:9780060792176ISBN:0060792175
Description: New. 0060792175 Brand New Book With Remainder Mark. May Have Slight Shelf Wear. In-Stock Now For Immediate Secure Packaging & Delivery wear on DJ. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 8/23/2005
ISBN-13:9780060792176ISBN:0060792175
Description: Fine. 0060792175 Ships next business day. NEW/UNREAD! ! ! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing--Has a small black line on bottom/exterior edge of pages. May have light shelf wear to cover from storage, if any. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2005-09-01
ISBN-13:9780060792176ISBN:0060792175
Description: New. Brand New. Gift Condition. Free tracking # included! International buyers are welcome. We ship every business day. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! read more
Description: New. 0061686670 Brand New Book With Remainder Mark. May Have Slight Shelf Wear. In-Stock Now For Immediate Secure Packaging & Delivery wear on DJ. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2003-04-01
ISBN-13:9780060529703ISBN:0060529709
Description: Very Good. Mild shelf and corner wear; Tanning to page edges; Mild rubbing to covers and spine; ** Free USPS tracking and confirm on US orders ** read more
Description: Very Good. 0060529709 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Description: Very Good. 0060529709 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Perennial Library, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780060792176ISBN:0060792175
Description: Anne Chalmers (Book design and drawing) Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Wraps; 276 pages; Textblock is tight with no internal markings; Bright pictorial cover with no tears, no creasing to the spine and modest shelf and edge wear; ....(With only a photograph, a young man sets out to find a woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, a young Ukrainian translator, the young man Jonathan is led on a journey over a ... read more
Binding: Audio Cassette
Publisher: Recorded Books
Date Published: 2002-03
ISBN-13:9781402528514ISBN:1402528515
Description: Very Good. NINE FINE UNABRIDGED AUDIO CASSETTES IN AN X-LIBRARY CLAMSHELL CASE. OVER ELEVEN HOURS PLAYING TIME NARRATED BY JEFF WOODMAN AND SCOTT SHINA. DAILY SHIPPING. read more
"This brilliant debut novel by Jonathan Safran Foer is a deeply-felt imaginative achievement. It is wholly recommendable, even if it is only half of a good book. The half that is good--no, great--is so worthy as to overshadow the book's other half, which is, sad to say, an embarassing if rightly-intended misfire.
The half that is successful is the tale of the fictional Jonathan Safran Foer's search for the story of his ancestors. It is successful as a story, but especially in the way it is told, in the hilarious, fractured, malapropriate voice of Alex, the Ukrainian translator/guide. Alex's way of speaking jumps instantly into the pantheon of great narratorial voices in literature, right next to Huckleberry Finn, to whom the technique hugely owes allegiance. Foer is doing the Twain bit of putting his story in the mouth of of a speaker of "substandard English," and of letting this voice become, eventually, poetic and utterly profound. It is a great and a wonderful achievement.
Part of what is terrific about this is that Alex's voice changes throughout the course of the narrative, as he learns more correct English from his writer-idol, Foer. So the book shows not only a narrative arc, but a corresponding arc of style as well.
The Alex-spoken chapters alternate with the supposed novel about his ancestors which the fictional Foer is writing, and which Alex progressively comments on when his sections come around again. Unfortunately, the quaint story of the ancestors in their small village doesn't have the brilliance of Alex's parts. This whole section of the novel reads like a Jewish folktale, full of magical-realist touches, but somehow it doesn't have a stamp of truth or real honesty to it. it comes off as cloying and precious, to tell the truth.
It might be argued that this quality was a very deliberate choice by the author. The idea here, completely supported by the novel as a whole, would be that the real story of the ancestors and their destruction in the holocaust is so harrowing that it cannot and should not be remembered by the fictional Foer. So instead, he creates this folktale version of events, with wild and magical characters and so forth.
Sure, I see that. I know that that is part of what is going on. The contrast between the story as told and the harrowing history as we eventually discover it it huge. But for me, it didn't work. The magical-realist nostalgia sections have to have an integrity and an honesty at their heart. And these are lacking in that, lacking in some deeply-felt spirit that would connect them with reality. They seem cartoony. They are trying way too hard. This is not Isaac Bashevis Singer, but is trying hard to be, and the attempt becomes embarassing after awhile.
The film version of the novel very rightly left out this half of the story entirely, and was very true to Alex's narrative. It worked, I thought, quite well.
As I said at the outset, though, the Alex parts are so well done, so strong and funny and well-told, that they carry the novel. Though only half-successful, this is a very good book."
"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."
"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 over a more complex truth. For example, near the end the hero's grandfather is talking to a statue, and the statue tells a story about a couple living near a waterfall. At first the wife hates the constant noise. Over time she gets used to the sound, until finally she can't hear it at all. She dances and splashes in the falls, completely deaf to the roar. The metaphor is that parents eventually get over the death of a child, and that's essentially true, but it's made dishonest by Foer's lazy cuteness. When you're inside washing dishes maybe you don't hear the waterfall anymore, but if you go up and splash in it, it's deafening.
The cuteness crops up constantly ("first they had meetings every day, then every other day, then every other every other day"). At best I could imagine Peter Faulk reading it to me a la Princess Bride, but even that was an effort to keep up and eventually some piece of repulsiveness would shatter the illusion. All this cuteness, and all this dishonesty, could possibly be overcome, if only the story was good. But it's not. Foer builds up some suspense by withholding information and other cheap trickery, but there's nothing up his sleeve. By the time the big illumination finally comes, we've already pretty much guessed it. This book is all style, no substance, and other than the one great gag, the style isn't very good."
"Jonhathan Safran Foer displays a huge talent to weave humour with what is a very painfully traumatic time in history, but manages to not make it pityful and pithy, which could have easily been done."
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