Book Review: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safron Foer

Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps my expectations were to down to Earth.

Or perhaps Everything Is Illuminated is just a bit overrated.

Let the reader beware books that come packaged with literary aspirations and disguised by tricks and strange formatting. There may be something there, but it might just as well be literary fluff.

Everything is Illuminated is Jonathan Safron Foer’s first book, but the second of his that I’ve read. His second, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was far more interesting, better written, and more credibly worthwhile fiction. In fact, it was on the weight of Extremely Loud that I picked up Everything is Illuminated (well, that and my book club had voted to read it, but you know what they say about democracy).

I should also admit that just prior to reading Everything is Illuminated, I finished William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, and Unbroken by Laura Hillebrandt. In recent years, I’ve read HHhH by Laurent Binet, Frozen in Time and Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff, and With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda, just to name a few. I very much enjoy World War II history, and while I’m no historian, I am sensitive to the nuances of the period.

Foer is anything but sensitive to the nuances, let alone the bare historical facts. Rather, Foer seems to rely more on his reader being vaguely aware the World War II happened and that a lot of people (especially Jews) died. But at whose hands? And what were the times like? And what are the times like now? His approach becomes far more fantastical and…strange? I won’t even go into the plot, but trust me: it’s just weird, and I never can quite figure out if he’s making stuff up or if these are really events from his history. No, I take that back–they’re clearly not real events. But how they fit into real events is difficult to know, or even if they’re supposed to.

Which brings me back to expectations. Perhaps if I had opened the book expecting a literary fantasy (I think the academic types would call it something akin to “magic realism,” not too far from Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), then I may have been able to swallow it better.

Expectations aside, there are moments when the writer that Foer will become (is becoming?) shine through in distinctive and memorable ways. One of my favorite aspects of the novel is the voice of Foer’s driver/guide during his visit to Eastern Europe. While at times Foer seems to overwrite the character, the effect is in general humorous as he seems to utilize an English thesaurus to come up with words that would not otherwise apply. I lived in Eastern Europe for two years in my late teens and early twenties, and I could hear the echo of individuals I knew then as they learned English, often using words and phrases they did not know and completely out of appropriate context.

Everything is Illuminated has moments of brilliance, but overall was disappointing to me. Perhaps I’m just not literary enough to appreciate the nuance Foer is doing. I mean, who am I to second guess people who actually know what they’re talking about? The book won all sorts of awards and Foer became the darling of American literati. Really, though, I suspect that it’s more likely that it’s more a product of Foer’s early efforts as a writer.  Add to this a heart-breakingly depressing ending–not because of the Holocaust, but because Foer seems to just run out of steam and decide to damn all his characters to horrible endings–and it was a tough book for me to enjoy.

PS. I’ve been told the movie and the book are significantly different, and that the movie is much more enjoyable and even funny.

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Title: Everything is Illuminated
Author: Jonathan Safron Foer
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: April 1, 2003
Format: Paperback
Pages: 276

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