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Sep. 14th, 2004
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Sep. 14th, 2004 04:18 pm
dig mr. belding's mid-life crisis. no, seriously, this is disturbing.
everything is illuminated
Sep. 14th, 2004 05:46 pmhere's my little critique of everything is illuminated that i put up on amazon:
People have noted that this is a work Foer began while a student of Joyce Carol Oates' at Princeton. It seems to me like it should have been workshopped a little more.
Foer seems to have a bit of an editing problem, in that every clever thing he happened to come up with has stayed in the book, regardless of whether or not it works. I sorta like the sense of randomness this adds to the book, but that's just personal taste.
The overlapping narratives are done well. I disliked the unevenness, though, of the one lapse into the grandfather's voice at the very very end. I thought that it ruined the rhythm of a book that had traded off between the perspectives of the two narrators, throwing in a third when the book could have easily ended without it.
I didn't find the things humorous that others did. The dog...eh. The idea that Ukranians would be baffled by vegetarianism didn't give me big belly laughs or anything. And I was a tad disgruntled by the English-via-Ukranian dialect used by Alex throughout. I didn't find it particularly amusing or well done. I didn't buy that the author actually spoke even the slightest bit of Ukranian. The skewed idioms he employs are invented wholesale, which is a nifty piece of writing but nipped at the logical part of my brain. I know in a book of magical realism you can't expect everything about a character to be logical, but Alex's side of the story was supposed to be the realistic part. Hrm. Just bothersome.
The character of Jonathan Safran Foer himself was woefully underdeveloped, but I suspect that was a conscious decision. Having such a major player be such a cypher took me out of the story a little bit.
OK, so those are my complaints. If you stick with the story and get over the hump to figure out the structure, you'll hopefully be swept along through the more "illuminating" protions of the book. Unlike a number of other reviewers, I found the historical portions of the book to be pretty engaging, especially those that dove head-on into raw emotionality. And for all the threads that get dropped along the way, you never know when something you never thought you'd get an answer to will pop its head back in.
The text raises a lot of questions about the nature of truth and identity (a concept made human by the character of Brod), but doesn't really take any definitive positions on any of the ideas it sparks. But again, I think this is conscious. Much as the character of Foer in the book is a cypher, I think Foer in reality wanted his book to act in the same way. A book that is about identity yet itself cannot, in the end, be defined.
Hmm. Maybe Foer is as clever as he thinks he is.
People have noted that this is a work Foer began while a student of Joyce Carol Oates' at Princeton. It seems to me like it should have been workshopped a little more.
Foer seems to have a bit of an editing problem, in that every clever thing he happened to come up with has stayed in the book, regardless of whether or not it works. I sorta like the sense of randomness this adds to the book, but that's just personal taste.
The overlapping narratives are done well. I disliked the unevenness, though, of the one lapse into the grandfather's voice at the very very end. I thought that it ruined the rhythm of a book that had traded off between the perspectives of the two narrators, throwing in a third when the book could have easily ended without it.
I didn't find the things humorous that others did. The dog...eh. The idea that Ukranians would be baffled by vegetarianism didn't give me big belly laughs or anything. And I was a tad disgruntled by the English-via-Ukranian dialect used by Alex throughout. I didn't find it particularly amusing or well done. I didn't buy that the author actually spoke even the slightest bit of Ukranian. The skewed idioms he employs are invented wholesale, which is a nifty piece of writing but nipped at the logical part of my brain. I know in a book of magical realism you can't expect everything about a character to be logical, but Alex's side of the story was supposed to be the realistic part. Hrm. Just bothersome.
The character of Jonathan Safran Foer himself was woefully underdeveloped, but I suspect that was a conscious decision. Having such a major player be such a cypher took me out of the story a little bit.
OK, so those are my complaints. If you stick with the story and get over the hump to figure out the structure, you'll hopefully be swept along through the more "illuminating" protions of the book. Unlike a number of other reviewers, I found the historical portions of the book to be pretty engaging, especially those that dove head-on into raw emotionality. And for all the threads that get dropped along the way, you never know when something you never thought you'd get an answer to will pop its head back in.
The text raises a lot of questions about the nature of truth and identity (a concept made human by the character of Brod), but doesn't really take any definitive positions on any of the ideas it sparks. But again, I think this is conscious. Much as the character of Foer in the book is a cypher, I think Foer in reality wanted his book to act in the same way. A book that is about identity yet itself cannot, in the end, be defined.
Hmm. Maybe Foer is as clever as he thinks he is.