I have noticed that when I read lit, it tends to be Jewish lit. An Irish friend reads mostly Irish lit (tho I don't envy her the Joyce!). That said, I adore this book-- it's one of my favorite "real" ones. I need to read it again. ( )

A very ambitious first novel. I really enjoyed the sections with Alex as narrator. The trachimbord sections were interesting, but I found all the loveless sex and rape, even if they were meant to demonstrate something about love, a bit off-putting. ( )

One of my sons thought I would be interested in reading Everything is Illuminated; he was correct!

While the story is fictional, and not autobiographic, the hame of the author, Jonathan Foer, and main character are the same. The story takes place in the context of Jonathan's trip to the Ukraine where he has gone to attempt to find his grandfather's shtetl, Trachimbrod, and to learn about his life there. in the mainJewish-American writer's attempt learn about his life. Jonathon, a young Jewish American has only a few maps and a photograph of a woman named Augustine, who is said to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Jonathan's guide on his trip is Alex, a young Ukrainian man. They are both twenty-one. Their driver, Alex's grandfather, who claims to be blind, also brings his dog, "Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior" along on the trip.

Alex's fractured English and cultural differences between him and Jonathon make many of their interactions both amusing and confounding. The trip to Trachimbrod becomes a cross-country odessey when Sammy Davis Junior Junior eats Jonathan's maps. ( )

As the title suggests, one of the best things about this book is Foer's use of pidgin English. It's not even really pidgin English, though, it's most like the kind of English you hear from someone who's learned English without learning any of the conventions of a native speaker, and it just ends up making a wonky kind of sense. One of my favorite parts is when Alex is telling a story about getting in a car accident and he says "My face gave a high-five to the windshield" (or something like that). It really cracked me up.

Yes! A book about the Holocaust made me laugh. Crazy. ( )

If I had read this more succinctly and not stretched it out over a few months, it probably would have been even more interesting. However, I read several others books in the meantime and often lost some of the flow. It's very creative, symbolic, metaphorical, and deep, so my attention did not give it justice. I think it would do well with a re-read, study, and discussion. There are three threads to the book -- letters from Alex, the manuscript, and Alex's narration of Jonathan's excursion, and they're obviously linked but it is not an easy puzzle to piece together all the layers of the stories, given that everything is story and reality simultaneously. Intriguing for sure.