As promised: a book review!

Everything is Illuminated

This is the second book I've read by this author (Jonathan Safran Foer). The other, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (I know you're supposed to underline book titles but I can't figure out how to do that), is one of my favorite books. That one gets TEN pretzel bites. Go read it. I didn't like this one quite as much, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Part of it is not entirely Jonathan Safran Foer's fault. "Everything is Illuminated" is not a Holocaust book in the traditional sense, but it does deal with the subject quite a bit, and I feel like these horrible things like the Holocaust and slavery have been written about so much in such a mediocre way that they don't feel as big or as important as they ought to.

That being said! Jonathan Safran Foer is not a mediocre writer. Far from it. Actually, he's one of the three writers that I respect the most. He has a way of writing things that are beautiful and funny and heartbreaking at the same time. I think sometimes his writing actually borders on something beyond storytelling, something more like visual art. Also, even though this book was kind of about the Holocaust, it also kind of wasn't. It's like the Holocaust was just a jumping off point to show how big life can be.


The book had two alternating sections. Part of it was this sort of magical realism thing Jonathan (the character) wrote about his family history. I liked that because it sort blurred the line between what was believable and based in reality and what was just complete fantasy. In this section, I found the word "crespucular" (one of our SAT vocab words which I thought was completely worthless. I guess he proved me wrong). The other part was written by a character, Alex, who didn't speak English very well, so it was all a little off in this hilarious kind of way that sometimes ended up sounding really nice. For example, he says "KGBing" instead of "spying" which I think I'm going to start using now.


So! In summary: I wanna be Jonathan Safran Foer. I wanna use the word KGBing. This book is beautiful and funny and heartbreaking. 9 pretzel bites!

KAY