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Strictly Necessary Strictly Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. Sep 23, emma rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , couldn-t-wait-to-read , 5-stars , owned , favorite-authors , reread , literary-fiction , reviewed , i-love-these-characters , recommend. Ho-ly shit. This book was incredible. Just for a hot sec. Of course I have ghosts. What are your ghosts like? They are on the inside of the lids of my eyes.
This is also where my ghosts reside. You have ghosts? But you are a child. I am not a child. But you have not known love. These are my ghosts. The spaces amid love. These characters may very well stay with me for the rest of my life.
The metafiction how-much-is-real Jonathan Safran Foer, dedicated to his notebook, staunch vegetarian. Brod and her sadnesses, her love for everyone and everything and no one and nothing. The Gypsy girl whose heart broke for Safran, whom she did not love, and his books organized by the colors of their spines.
This book sometimes gave me a feeling like my heart was swelling up. My hand twitched for a pencil or a Post-It while I read these lovely words, but I was always too absorbed and soon forgot what I was trying to remember to do. That feeling is why I read. This was slow to start, and I almost--god forbid--DNFed it.
Can you imagine? Even two-thirds in I contemplated three stars, sadly reminiscing on my vast love of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I still hope you guys read this and will consider picking it up, though. Because I want to live inside this book. I so badly want you to read it. I want to write like Jonathan Safran Foer can write. View all 9 comments. Sep 22, Jason rated it it was ok Shelves: reviewed , wine-club , for-kindle , 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 conversati 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? 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 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.
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. 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.
Sentences, for example, like these! 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.
Yes, there is a lot of talk of love in this book. I think JSF wrote it before he got himself hitched. View all 61 comments. Jun 21, BlackOxford rated it really liked it Shelves: american , jewish. Funny In a Tragic Way What would the English of a bright Ukrainian who had learnt it largely from local pop culture and a thesaurus sound like? Hilarious actually. Especially in the telling of a tale which has both been told so many times, and can never be told adequately: the Holocaust.
The author writes history of a post-modernist sort ; the lad writes of the trip and comments on the author's text. It is these latter comments that are most compelling because they reveal both the essential irrelevance of the destruction of European Jewry to the lives of those who have inherited the unexpurgated guilt of the massacres, and the way in which that guilt remains an essential but unspoken feature of life.
Without the comedic language to make this contradictory point, the book would likely fall flat. With that language, and it's gradual 'normalisation' during the course of the tale, the book becomes a story of revelation. View 1 comment. Oct 19, Matthieu rated it it was ok Recommended to Matthieu by: K. Gimmicks as substance. View all comments. 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.
View all 15 comments. Sep 24, Beth rated it it was amazing. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Probably in the top 3 best books I've read in the past 5 years. It is not an easy book to read, and it is at times bizarre and vaguely offensive.
But it is also hearbreaking and heartwarming and funny and thought-provoking. I don't think that Jonathan becomes some sort of terrible person, but it is telling that Jonathon and Sasha stop writing to each other. I believe i Probably in the top 3 best books I've read in the past 5 years. I believe it is because Sasha has come away with a much deeper understanding of himself from their trip, while Jonathan seems to have mostly come away with good writing material. Sasha becomes so angry with Jonathon's story because it is not truthful in the way that Sasha is truthful.
Jonathan wants to take pieces of what he knows for sure, and embellish and expound and fictionalize it to make enticing fiction. In doing so, he does make his grandfather out to be a pretty bizarre person, taking only his supposition that his grandfather had a dead arm and a lot of teeth as a baby, and looking through his journal, and then making up this whole ridiculous story about how the Safran had affairs with over 2, women because they were strangely attracted to the dead arm.
Sasha, on the other hand, comes away from the trip with a better understanding of, and deeper love for, his grandfather, and a commitment to truth. He realizes the value of truth in seeing what his grandfather had to live with and in coming clean on certain aspects of his life. For instance, he admits that he is a virgin, though he boasted in the beginning of how many women he was "carnal" with.
And he is not especially tall, as he also boasted about in the beginning. He also embraces his love for Ukraine, giving his savings away and deciding to stay there and take care of his family. And he is finally able to stand up to his drunken father and banish him from the family. So, I believe that the title refers to the way the past illuminates the present, and the present illuminates the past.
But differently for our two "heroes". For Jonathan, he has found the material he needs to become the writer he believes he was born to be. For Sasha, he has found the truth he needs to become the man he wants to be. You could argue the value of each. Jonathan writes everything down, documents the names on all of Lista's boxes, reads guidebooks on properly dealing with Ukrainians. Sasha listens to the stories, takes it all in, doesn't think to worry about each little detail to remember forever.
Sasha is more concerned with understanding the heart of the truth, in short, while Jonathon wants the material to use later. In one final thought, I remember that Ernest Hemingway was mentioned at some point in the novel, I believe by Sasha in talking about Jonathan becoming a great American writer. I took an American Lit class in which we discussed the novel Garden of Eden by Hemingway, and the way in which Hemingway addressed the guilt of the writer who puts themselves and those they love in emotionally reckless positions in order to create good writing material.
I just thought it was interesting that his name comes into this novel because of Jonathan's intentions. Not that Jonathan creates any sort of emotionally reckless situation, but he in some way sells out his family history in order to write an interesting book.
On a side note, don't see the movie if you want it to be like the book. The movie felt like the screenwriter thoroughly read the first half of the book, and then skimmed the rest in about 8 minutes and threw the movie together from that. I felt like it missed everything that was important about the story. View all 6 comments. Nov 10, Bram rated it really liked it Shelves: 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 reading at the time e.
The Recognitions , this leanness and pacing were very welcome. First, the humor. Bold, bold move. And one that I, as a long-time Abbot and Costello fan, happen to love. But you might. There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention. No Pynchonian slapstick with banana peels or rapacious adenoids. No Rothish satyriasis or Barthish metaparody or arch Woody-Allenish kvetching.
There are none of the ba-bing ba-bang reversals of modern sit-coms; nor are there precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent co-workers. View all 20 comments. Dec 01, Fabian rated it it was amazing. The picaresque interchange between youths is like a more irreverent' albeit magic-natural take on Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. The imperfect prisms, the barriers of language of history and the imagination all these tools of literary alchemy are proudly on display.
Ingeniously, in EiI, a potato falling to the ground becomes a thing of singular beauty The picaresque interchange between youths is like a more irreverent' albeit magic-natural take on Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Ingeniously, in EiI, a potato falling to the ground becomes a thing of singular beauty. The writer simply must get props poor lathering up this sad story that includes the Holocaust with joyous amounts of high-grade and universal ripoaring comedy.
One of the ten most important novels of the new millennium. And its rich; exhilarating; it has balls. It is fresh prose-like-a-rose and exhibits one intuitive, clever, downright beautiful structure. With its proud badges of a first--not to mention major literary novel audaciousness it is a wondrous, always necessary! And, like me, somehow I really crave for a sequel to this, which I very rarely do, you will think the same. Jan 14, Emily B rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites.
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. I love these kinds of surprises which push me to give more than one chance to genres of books I didn't immediately find compelling. The narrative is by no means traditional, the non-linear fragmented structure jumps around in time, and there are stories within the stories told by three different narrators, switching style, language and viewpoint, sometimes without satisfying conclusion.
We are following the main character Jonathan the author himself in a journey across Ukrania in the quest of finding the mysterious woman Augustina, who may, or may not save his Jewish grandfather from the Nazis.
As the stories of Jonathan's ancestors unravel more and more emotional and compelling stories of Ukrainian people are being displayed in the magic realism history of the village of Trachimbrod, from to the arrival of the Nazi army in I was definitely highly interested and emotionally and mentally invested in stories, and considering that connection happens really with me and this type of literary fiction, I consider this a good book, but I think it would benefit from simplification but then again, it would lose a bit of its quirkiness and uniqueness, especially for the genre of historical fiction.
I loved the arrogant trippiness of the prose throughout and I want to try more Safran in the future for sure. I think fans of work similar to David Grossman 's A Horse Walks into a Bar would immensely enjoy Everything is illuminated, in my opinion, much more vivid and better-crafted work. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do?
May 28, Nathan Pearson rated it it was ok. 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 View all 3 comments. Mar 14, Steve rated it liked it. 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 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. 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. 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. The stories, in general, were sort of inane. 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.
My feeling with this one, though, is that he had no one in his corner telling him anything other than how great he was. View all 21 comments. Jan 21, Brian Godsey rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: everyone. Shelves: totally-awesome-books , good-books , fiction.
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 des If I haven't laid out my good-book-philosophy yet, then I'll do it here.
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. 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 , presumably , because he reads when he has time, for enjoyment, and not to get to the end of the book.
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]. 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. 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. 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.
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? 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. Jonathan Safran Foer's debut??
Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past. As his search moves back in time, the fantastical history moves forward, until reality collides with fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.
Read it, and you'll feel altered, chastened?? Read, you can feel the life beating. Philadelphia Inquirer. Pages : Carton Quantity : Age s : 14,15, Grade s : It will be wonderful if he writes many more books.
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