Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2110 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The simplest thing would be to describe Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish-American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex) and a flatulent mongrel bitch, named Sammy Davis JR JR. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains and Latka from the US television series Taxi. (Sentences such as "It is mammoth honour for me write for a writer, especially when he is American writer, like Ernest Hemingway"; "It is bad and popular habit for people in Ukraine to take things without asking" are the norm.) Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by "Safran Foer"--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the Shetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

If all this sounds a little daunting don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer. Admittedly he has an annoying habit of capitalising great chunks of text, but minor typographical nuances are easy to ignore in a book that combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship and loss. --Travis Elborough

New Statesman
"a work of wit and invention…cross-fertilised by a wild profusion of influences, styles, stories and narrators, spilling over boundaries in its excess."

The London Standard
"Salman Rushdie and Franz Kafka are among the names that come to mind as one passage of bravura writing follows another."

Customer Reviews

The most perfect creation of beautiful fiction
I don't normally write reviews but if I had one mission in life it would be to get everyone to read this book. It is simply magnificent. It is so beautifully written that I had to buy two copies; one for best, and one in which I could underline all my favourite quotes (I might as well not bothered - I nearly underlined everything).

I will not explain the narrative as other reviewers have already done so, I just want to say that this book will make you laugh out loud, it will move you, and it will inspire in you feelings that you never knew you had. It is pure beauty. Please do not listen to those reviewers who gave this less than 4 stars.

This book would only seem pretentious to someone who could not appreciate great literature. This, and Foer's other novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, are the two finest books I have ever read. They instil a sense of magic in the everyday... which, in the face of the present state of society, is arguably invaluable.

I emplore you to read this book, adore it, and then buy it for everyone you love.

Quirky In The Right Ways
I bought this book on the strength of reading on the back cover that there was a dog in it called Sammy Davis Jr, Jr.

After reading the first page and wiping the tears from my eyes, I gleefully launched into the book walking down the pavement upon leaving the book store. To my initial disappointment the hilarity didn't continue unabated, and the book's structure took some getting used to - it is effectively a series of letters between two young men (one from the US and one from Ukraine who is armed with a thesaurus and has no fear of using it); interspersed with the narration of the two men's journey through Ukraine in search of the village of the American's forbears, which was wiped out by the Nazis; alongside a story based in the village, but from a much earlier time.

The humour does continue to thread its way through the story, but a human tenderness, and a great deal of pain also figure prominently as the story evolves.

Upon finishing the book I had been strongly moved, and had laughed out loud several times. I will enjoy reading it again.

As a word of caution though, if you don't enjoy word play, and weren't the type of kid who sat writing out their sentences including the words from their primary school weekly spelling list armed with a thesaurus and a determination to use the fanciest words possible at all times, then you may not find the humour quite so humorous!

Strange in a good way
I enjoyed reading this book. It was at times funny, and at times sad, and most of the time strange. The parts that were Jonathan's writings were very surreal, similar in style to South American magical realism books, and I didn't always have much idea of what was going on (I must not be intellectual enough) but helpfully, the other main character, Alex described some of the situations again in his own words and I thought, Oh, that's what that was about.
I would recommend the book to people who like things that are a little bit different.