Reviews with content warning for War - Everything is Illuminated

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Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

18 reviews

leilorenzo's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

There's one trigger warning after the next. They might not (always) be described in perfect detail, but they are there. I tried my best to include them all.

The back and forth narration (it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the chapter title’s format, oops) was a great tool. The characters were left vulnerable to the reader thanks to being vulnerable to each other in their correspondence.

I found SO many gems throughout it that practically every page has some annotation.

It is a strong punch delivered so beautifully that you don’t realize it until the book's last third.

The use of language was crafted just right, entwining humour with tragedy, and laughter amidst the terror.

It is now proudly resting on my favourite’s shelf.

Content Warnings

viiemzee's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

The writing style of this book gave me great pause in the beginning, and it took until about page 90 for my to truly get into the spirit of the story, but when I did I couldn't put it down.

The story concerns a fictionalized version of the author, also named Jonathan, who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather when the Nazis arrived in Trachimbrod (a fictionalized version of Trochenbrod, a real Jewish schtetl that was eradicated by the Nazis during World War II). He is accompanied by a 'seeing eye' dog who just wants to hump his leg (Jonathan hates dogs), a translator who is supremely bad at his job (his English isn't perfect) and the translator's grandfather who is driving them around Ukraine to find this schtetl (and who is also hiding a secret from them).

The story is told through three differing points of view, although two of them come from the same narrative voice. Alex, the translator, provides the story of the trip through Ukraine with his broken English and outdated American slang; he is also writing letters to Jonathan as Jonathan writes the book and sends it to him chapter by chapter, asking Alex to edit and read through it. The third voice is Jonathan, writing his family history, and the story of how his family came to be.

While there are some moments that made me flinch (see: the way that male characters talk about women they encounter, but then again, this happens in almost every male-written story I've read), the story has so much heart to it. The characters have so much motivation and drive, and it's also interesting to see the way a Jewish person writes about a tragedy during a Holocaust that wasn't a concentration camp, but the eradication of a small settlement that was wiped out so thoroughly it doesn't even exist anymore.

Foer writes and weaves his story beautifully, and I finished this book with tears in my eyes as I sat there and thought about the horrors that the Jewish people have faced, and the profound trauma that it has left on them for generations. One of the best parts of the book, in my opinion, is when Jonathan writes about memory, and how Jewish people experience memory as a sixth sense. I feel like that is one of the truest sentiments I've ever heard.

4/5 simply because the writing style is not something that I particularly gravitate towards usually, but the story is too compelling not to continue reading.

Content Warnings