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    Everything Is Illuminated
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    Everything Is Illuminated
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    Everything Is Illuminated
    Audiobook11 hours

    Everything Is Illuminated

    Written by Jonathan Safran Foer

    Narrated by Scott Shina and Jeff Woodman

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Humor and pathos are deftly woven together in this remarkable New York Times best-seller that has won sweeping critical acclaim. Jonathan is a Jewish college student searching Europe for the one person he believes can explain his roots. Alex, a lover of America and unsurpassed butcher of the English language, is his lovable Ukrainian guide. On their quixotic quest, past and present merge-and hysterically funny moments collide with great tragedy.

    Editor's Note

    Best bits of postmodernism…

    This debut is the best example of Foer’s ability to mix humor, warmth, and literary excellence with the tools of unreliable narration and metafiction. A compelling narrative that’s as bombastic as it is — at times — subtle.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2002
    ISBN9781436101066
    Author

    Jonathan Safran Foer

    JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER is the author of the novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and a work of nonfiction, Eating Animals. His books have won numerous awards and have been translated into 36 languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Everything Is Illuminated

    4/5

    3,701 ratings149 reviews

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    • 1/5
      I hated this book. Just out of pure stubbornness, I rarely do not finish a book that I have started. I gave up on this book after about 80 pages. Basically, it is the story of a young man (cleverly named Jonathan Safran Foer) investigating his Jewish history in the Ukraine and, in particular, a woman in a photograph he has (I evidently did not get far enough to learn the connection here or did not understand it). The book alternates between two points of view. In one, set in the modern day, Jonathan engages a guide and translator to help him the village of his ancestors. The other takes place in the past and is apparently the story of his ancestors(It was not clear to me in the first 80 pages). The writing in the modern portion of the book is affected and too clever. I think it was supposed to be humorous but I did not find it so. The historical part was confusing and overwritten. This is the lowest rating I have given on LT.
    • 4/5
      I admit when I first began reading this book, I was confused. I almost stopped reading, but luckily I stayed with it. It is broken into three different chapter types: letters from Alex after Jonathan visited, Alex's story detailing Jonathan's visit, and Jonathan's novel about his ancestors. These chapters rotate, and it was a lot of fun jumping back and forth between the stories. As one reviewer already mentioned, Alex's letters repeated quite a bit from Jonathan's stories, and this was slightly annoying, but it didn't ruin the book for me. All of the stories were very interesting, although Jonathan's stories remained fairly confusing throughout the novel, but I learned to just go with it, and I really enjoyed this book. I would definitely read it again.
    • 2/5
      1.5 stars I don’t even have a summary. There was a Ukrainian translator with horrible English. There was an author visiting Ukraine, who met up with the translator and they, along with the translator’s grandfather were looking for a village that didn’t seem to exist, so it seemed. And, throughout the book, some chapters backed up in time to Jewish people starting in the 1700s, but I never quite figured out what was going on there, as the time jumped forward in other chapters; at some point it was during WWII. Apparently, these were ancestors of the author (the author character, not the actual author)?This was weird. It is going to be my lowest rated book of the year (I think this is only the 2nd book, ever, I’ve rated less than 2 stars). I couldn’t figure out how the translator could even be a translator with his awful English; the author had the same name as the actual author of the book, Jonathan Safran Foer, so that simply confused me for ages. There were other odd parts written like a play or written like Bible verses. Weird. Not good. At all. It’s too bad – I think the only other book I’ve read by this author (nonfiction) made it on my favourites list for that year.
    • 4/5
      So far, so good.
    • 4/5
      I admit when I first began reading this book, I was confused. I almost stopped reading, but luckily I stayed with it. It is broken into three different chapter types: letters from Alex after Jonathan visited, Alex's story detailing Jonathan's visit, and Jonathan's novel about his ancestors. These chapters rotate, and it was a lot of fun jumping back and forth between the stories. As one reviewer already mentioned, Alex's letters repeated quite a bit from Jonathan's stories, and this was slightly annoying, but it didn't ruin the book for me. All of the stories were very interesting, although Jonathan's stories remained fairly confusing throughout the novel, but I learned to just go with it, and I really enjoyed this book. I would definitely read it again.
    • 1/5
      Extremely pretentious; poorly written.
    • 1/5
      Safran Foer gives the impression of being someone whose parents never ceased telling him, from an early age, how clever and adorable he was. And who has never ceased believing it, and never ceased believing that everyone else must just naturally believe it. It's a novel made out of the same stuff as those godawful cutesy smirking songs Adam Sandler used to do on Saturday Night Live. Somewhere before page 100 I threw it across the room.
    • 2/5
      This book confused me so much. It was beautifully written and I really wanted to like it... but I didn't understand it. It was a little difficult to follow the plot through a series of letters, a novel, and the present, but after I caught on it was brilliant-- until the end. I still have no idea. I think that a lot of the loose ends were supposed to come together but they just didn't for me. How was Alex's grandpa involved? Why did he think he could find Augustine? I was left with so many questions. Maybe they were answered but I was too distracted by the style to understand them, but they seemed conspicuously absent at the end, and not in the good way that leaves things to the imagination. It seems like a few chapters that connected the dots were just missing.
    • 2/5
      "Willy Wonka meets Schindler's List"
    • 1/5
      I actually only read the first ten or fifteen pages of this book before I threw it across the room in abject frustration. I couldn't deal with the cutesy "Voice."
    • 2/5
      I'll say it up front: I just didn't like this book, and I'm having trouble expressing exactly why. The main plot revolves around a young American writer (not-so-coincidentally named Jonathan Safran Foer) who goes to the Ukraine to try to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is accompanied in this task by Alex, a translator whose English skills may be slightly less "premium" than he promised; Alex's grandfather, a driver who claims to be blind; and Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, an ostensible seeing-eye dog.The reader is thrown back and forth through time, from the 1790s to the 1940s to whenever the present day of the book is. Also, one is tossed between Alex's letters to Jonathan and Jonathan's book, with forays into other sources from time to time. All of that was fine, although some sections are tedious. The part that was mostly difficult for me was the smug and self-satisfied voice of Jonathan (the author, as distinct from the character). I'll give you an example: In the first section from Alex, he says that his mother told him, "One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family." In the next letter we read from Alex, he tells Jonathan, "It makes me happy that you relished the sentence 'One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family' I must inquire you, however, what is a truism?" It just seems like the trick of a condescending writer to simultaneously single out a great line and call it essentially meaningless. And you can call it postmodern playing with the concept of the novel, the role of characters in it, the relationship between the reader, writer and characters, etc., but it damaged my trust in Foer by making me suspect he thinks he's always the smartest one in the room. Recommended for: special snowflakes.Quote: "A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living."
    • 3/5
      I didn't know what this book was about when I began reading...but I liked it. Alex cracked me up with his thesauras English...but then it started to get sad. Still enjoyable, but it kind of lost me in a few chapters.
    • 2/5
      I found the parts written by the interpreter as hilarious as claimed - at first. They got a bit old after chapter or two. I didn't much enjoy the "fable" type style which was used to tell most of the story or really the parts about Brod and stories of the shtetl.

      I did find the parts outlining what happened with the Nazis in Trichembrod and Kolte both powerful and shatteringly heartbreaking. These stories made the book worth reading. The stories of the interpreter and his family were sad. Overall, it left me feeling depressed.
    • 2/5
      Got bored of this and gave up. The parts that take place in the present are quite amusing but the magical realism stuff just isn't my cup of tea. I think I'd rather see the movie.
    • 3/5
      I appreciated this book for its creativity and consistency. But I found the plot dull and over-stretched, and the characters to be overbearingly quirky.
    • 3/5
      I actually like the movie better. I don't think that's ever happened to me before now.
    • 2/5
      An interesting read.
      I sometimes found it a bit trying, but overall enjoyed reading it.
    • 3/5
      I'm lost with this book. I didn't get it, the characters were confusing and I think I got thoroughly lost enough that the stories (and time changes) just felt disjunctive. I think I knew how all the characters fit in place, but the non-linearity of it just stripped my empathy for the characters.
    • 3/5
      I never really got into this one. It took me forever to read it and I just never felt hooked (unlike "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by the same author which I loved and tore through in a day or two).
    • 4/5
      I know this book is a love-it-or-hate-it type. I know lots of people who said that, after Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is just a knock-off of the same thing.

      I disagree.

      EiI Has a very interesting story to it. Several of them, it seems. But it just doesn't feel as true, as sincere, as EL&IC. I really felt more like Foer was trying to manipulate me through this book, like he was trying to evoke certain reactions--by turns joy, sadness, horror--through his characters.

      He's obviously a talented man and he wrote a very good book; I enjoyed EiI a lot. But it feels like the first book by a talented man, and I'm very glad I started with Extremely Loud.
    • 3/5
      Seems overwrought at times, and potent in others. One of Foer's first books, and he is still stretching his legs, so to speak.
    • 2/5
      Couldn't get into this one. I only read the first couple of chapters before I gave up on the overly clever writing.
    • 4/5
      I had no idea that this book was such a trip! The different fantastical styles of writing Foer uses to present a simple journey of discovery really helps the powerful ending. I could not put down the last 70 pages, especially the pages with the single run-on sentence. Great and creative techniques!
    • 5/5
      All I can say is wow!OK, I can say more than that, but I wanted to say it first in case my review takes too long to get to my opinions.The book is divided into 2 main alternating narratives. The fictionalized author (JSF) weaves a magical realist tale spanning two centuries of a predominantly Jewish village, Trachimbrod, in Ukraine from which he is a descendant. His Ukrainian guide Alex relates a traditional realistic story as he and his grandfather and dog are hired as (hilariously inexperienced) guides to help the American writer JSF find the village. In between the alternating stories are letters from Alex to JSF after the conclusion of the modern day story, as the two work together to write the stories we are reading.All of these narrative techniques add so much to the experience of this novel, there is so much more than can be touched on here. JSF's tale is beautifully written and highlights (among with much more) the multiple meanings of love and the spiritual connections between people and places, the past and the future (and vice versa actually). Alex gives us a heartwarming journey story which mirrors his own coming of age transition. Finally, the letters from Alex to JSF provide the glue which bind the story and tale into a cohesive whole, despite the distinct styles in which each is treated. They also are the emotional core of the book as Alex's reactions to JSF's story span from utter amazement to bitter disappointment, both for how he feels about JSF and for the world as he is beginning to recognize through the course of the book.Now, it is true that the depicted events of the Nazi attack on Trachimbrod are quite dark. It isn't for all readers, but in my opinion people shouldn't avoid the book because of it. In fact, an ingenious technique is used to warn and prepare the reader, giving the reader the choice to avoid this part if they are not ready for it while still appreciating most of what the novel has to offer. You will know it when you see it.All in all, I feel like Everything is Illuminated is in the same league as To Kill a Mockingbird in terms of cohesive narratives utilizing a myriad of techniques to achieve a masterful blend of comedy and tragedy.
    • 1/5
      I loved first book...hated this one!!
    • 4/5
      Excellent and original.
    • 4/5
      In an opaque sort of way
    • 3/5
      A fun read. Nothing revelatory.
    • 5/5
      Awesome book, 10x better than the movie
    • 5/5
      Hilarious and beautiful.