Clever and occasionally moving.

http://livredor.livejournal.com/231473.html

It’s too bad I didn’t enjoy this book because I absolutely loved “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Foer. I was really excited about reading this thinking it would be equally good but it just didn’t live up to what I was expecting.

I was almost ready to give this a positive rating because I started to enjoy parts of the end but I couldn’t do it.

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?

I laughed my ass off on the tram to work (getting many strange looks from fellow passengers) and struggled to cope with the devasting climax! What a wonderful book! (Amazing to think it’s the author’s first.)

Took me a little while to get into the book, but I liked it once I did. Foer has a unique style of writing, I enjoyed it. The story is sad but worth the read.

I loved Everything is Illuminated. It reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marqez in the beauty of the language and the strangeness and sadness of the story. It was a little confusing though and by the end there were still certain things I didn’t understand. Definitely worth consuming.

A very funny book that gets sort of confusing. It twists around a lot and there is no doubt Foer can write, but this is kind of self-conscious literary. A bit puffed. Still, it is certainly unique and deserves a look see.