Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel [Paperback]

In in the interest of keeping this bashing brief and to the point, Foer fails to deliver the goods for the following reasons: lazy writing, ignorance of exploited subject matter, contrived characters and dramatic developments, cheap use of literary gimmicks to cover up lack of story.

Dear reader, allow me to bore and irritate you by declaring that Foer is utterly ignorant of the Russian language, Ukrainian customs, and my native city of Odessa. Allegedly, he shrugs his lack of research off with a laugh. This rather alarming habit of trivializing the importance of factual subject matter is disgusting not because it violates some objective paradigm of literary virtue, but because it exploits a grave and meaty subject while laughing off the hard work it deserves. Perhaps Foer thinks that his lazy scattering and transpositioning of English words transcends a dozen hours of mechanically generated Thesaurus entries. It does not.

Further along the same lines, the character of Alex is nothing more than a monkey sitting at an aforementioned electronic thesaurus and spitting out strings of unfunny, un-Russian, and lazy gibberish. If Foer wasn't busy trying to hack out Clockwork Orange or Catch-22, he might have spent more hours at a library or even bothered to learn some Russian to at the very least recognize speech patterns. Instead, we have a 'clever' 300 page wordplay and sketches.

Now, as for the subject itself, Foer, like so many polished young writers without anything to write about, chooses to borrow drama from someone else; not only a person, but a time. Like so many writers of little imagination, he digs in a fictional past (which he, once again, fails to investigate). So, Foer chooses to rewrite history and manipulate tragedy to infuse his story with an adequate sense of importance. WWII and the Holocaust, 2 of the major cataclysms of the modern era, are thrown into Foer's meatgrinder. This because the writer is so dry that he has to travel to another land and time - no, to invent another land and time (while affecting their reality) to spark his mind.

Oh, you might think that the story is redeemed by Foer's wicked satirical abilities. About the only scene I found funny was the potato-dropping incident in the restaurant. Shame on you Mr. Foer for butchering the English language (and not in any positive way). Shame on you for writing a fictitious piece of fictional storytelling.

Finally, a young writer with some talent. I had a conversation with a friend over how lousy a lot of these Gen-X or Post-Gen X writers are (ie: Dave Eggers,et al) and we agreed: EVERTHING IS ILLUMINATED is a creative and fun book that takes risks and delivers a solid little narrative. For a younger generation, especially, I would recommend, (but also, for any age group, and for those who love this work), in addition to: MIDDLESEX and LIFE OF PI, please look into: SIMON LAZARUS by M.A. Kirkwood. Now if anything is a fresh and deserving read it is this one. Add it to your Summer reading list.

Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes the way you look at everything: the world, love, hate, relationships, politics. Such is the case with EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. Now, not everyone is going to warm to this novel, but keep reading: "Everything is Illuminated" is the story of a young American (also with the name Jonathan Safran Foer, but this is a work of fiction) who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the holocaust. In the process the book tells several stories: the American's trip to the Ukraine, the story of his grandfather and the town history, his Ukrainian translator's personal struggles with family and identity, and his Ukrainian translator's grandfathers experience during the war. These stories are told in different voices, in different chapters interspersed throughout the book. Some of these work better than others, as Foer seems to have a desire to stretch into literary gimmicks that are not always neccesary. But when he gets it right the passages are as moving as anything I have ever read. His variety of voices allows a reflection on certain elements of the story that reinforces their meaning. Writing about love, personal history, death, and living on allows ample opportunity to take on issues that go to the heart of what it means to be human. It also creates the possibility of falling into a bottomless pit of reflection, over-analysis, and huge failure. This book flirts with those pitfalls at times, but never falls in. It creates scenes of incredible trauma, and manages to tell the story in a way that seems real (a significant achievement for a writer born in 1977). I am struggling to even describe the book, which speaks the complexity of the story and the skill in telling it. I am sure that my enjoyment of the book was enhanced by witnessing first hand some of the absurdity of life in Ukraine, but that is only part of the story. This is a riveting book, often spoken of in the same breath as "Bark of the Dogwood" with its odd cast of characters. A perfect companion to this book, BARK OF THE DOGWOOD, while completely different subject material, is nevertheless as entertaining. Both are great reads all 'round, but EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is like nothing else on the planet.