I really liked this book, and I’d like to read more by Safran Foer, for two reasons.

1) I like his use of language and I found the story very moving in much the same way that most of the other commenters did.

2) I think that in the case of this book, he has yet to develop a personal style. As much as I liked the structure of the story, it was a very calculated one. The pattern the book uses is a typically variety of ABBAABC, with A being the translator, B being the fictional past, and C being text from the fictional past. This is very clearly taken from the work of such authors as Kundera and Rushdie who, like Safran Foer, use this polyphonic form to tell an émigré story that is deeply marked by ethnicity.

In short: It’s good, but it’s not envelope pushing. I’d like to read something else by him to see where he takes the style. What is Everything is Illuminated a stylistic stepping-stone towards?