Our fearless moderator for this discussion is macduff, who has taught this book before. This is the last book of the Yale Open Course on The American Novel Since 1945. After this discussion, look for future MetaFilter book discussions via the MetaFilter group at Goodreads.com.

Also, I am going to be lazy and lift what I said about this book on Goodreads to reprint here:

This book was a good effort by a gifted young writer, but it will be a while before he knows enough to write something that really resonates and hangs together. Much of the book was just too much of a device -- too much Borat-style language mangling and dog farting/eating jokes to gain laughs, too much announcing the value of negatives (like "not-loving," whatever that is), too much play-style dialogue, too much sex. Yes, I said too much sex. The magical realism was taken to the point of ridiculousness and past. The sad result of all this was three rather fatal flaws for this book. First, I never really and truly cared about the characters. They were either too odd or too difficult to understand or too briefly met. It certainly did not help to have mirroring grandfathers rarely mentioned by name or even nickname, and about a zillion references to great-great-great relations. This was both impersonal and confusing. Second, of plot there is almost none, and one useful literary convention to remember is that plot interest helps to keep pages turning. Finally, the excesses swamped the truly compelling and memorably well done bits of this book. Those bits were the revelation of what happened to the town, and its Jews, and how the narrator's grandfather played a part. Those were powerful, but almost hidden within this overdone book.

I do look forward to reading more of Jonathan Safran Foer. Hopefully, maturity will bring him discipline, subtlety, and more of a reader's eye. And perhaps an excellent editor.

Hopefully, maturity will bring him discipline, subtlety, and more of a reader's eye. And perhaps an excellent editor.

No, his later books are much more annoying.

I loved this book. I found the puns brilliant and the characters doppelgangers or mirror images of each other. I even loved Sammy Davis Junior, Junior especially when she became Dean Martin Junior for a sentence. I was surprised that Dr. Hungerford mentioned that Foer was influenced by Roth, Nabokov, and Morrison but did not realize that Shakespeare, Mark Helprin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer's work also were important literary influences. Yes, the sex was overdone, but I wonder if Foer's agent did not encourage him to include the sex as my agent keeps telling me to include "more sex, more violence" in my book. (I do not listen to her, even though she tells me that's what sells).
Shakespeare uses the device of the hole in the wall to keep lovers apart in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Singer writes in his marvelous story "Gimpel the Fool" of the real world that is not the real world. Also, I feel that Mark Helprin also was an important influence in that he feels that the purpose of life is to "stop time and bring back the dead" which is what I think Foer is doing. Memories (or strings) are what tie the characters together which Dr. Hungerford never mentioned. In fact, the word "strings" is the most repeated word in the novel. The first mention of strings occurs when the character Safiowka has tied himself together with strings. The twins first notice that Brod is alive because they see strings, and the umbilical string from Brod's placenta gives the village a name because she is the string that holds their village together. Brod throws strings everywhere when she is the mermaid on the float on Trachim Day, The village dies because Safran's baby's umbilical cord (string) does not allow her to be born. Thus, a string of a baby girl causes a village to spring to life and the same type of string causes the last inhabitant to die. Only the sad gypsy woman who is caring for a child who was never born is left in a town killed by genocidal maniacs. She certainly was a character I could visualize and felt immense sympathy for. She was the outsider who was strung along by Safran, and she alone kept the memories of the destroyed town.
I thought the most harrowing scene was the one in which the Grandfather told his grandson how he had killed his best friend. The stream of consiousness style of dialogue was brilliantly effective and extremely poignant.
Sasha's love for his brother, the grandfather's remorse at the way he had raised his son, his "blindness" because he had killed his best friend, Sasha's desire to go to America, and his sad realization that he would never achieve his dreams spoke vividly to me. Only Foer's depiction of his ten year old grandfather's sex life and wedding day and night were ridiculous and gratuitous.
The only crictism I have is that the father's cruelty to his family could have been depicted more clearly.
I loved this paragraph which illustrates how much one writer owes another:
Cain killed his brother for plagiarizing one of his favorite little poems, which went like this:
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Unable to thwart the fury of a poet scorned, unable to continue writing as long as he knew that the pirates-pen sans would reap the booty of his industry, unable to suppress the question If iambs not for me, what will be for me?,(a parody of a great line by the the great Rabbi Hillel), unable Cain put an end to literary larceny forever, O so he thought...

And he ends the section with the question: Am I my brother's material? Of course, Cain, Of course.

This little quatrain sums up the theme of the book: Life is an island in a river. Trachimbrod was an island which was created by Trachim's wagon when it plunged into the river Brod. This accident which caused the death of two parents created a string which allowed a little baby girl to be born which held the little village together until the Nazis destroyed the physical area, but the wave of memories maintained by pictures, books,objects, memory books, and letters,sustains those who need these momentos, but some of us must be blind to what atrocities we have committed, because if we see how inhumane we humans are, "willows whiten, aspens quiver" and we cannot live with outselves.

The paragraph after the poem, of course, is Foer's acknowledgement that all writers copy from each other. (I have copied from some of the greatest writers of all time in my novel beginning with Shakespeare)

The letters that Alex and grandfather write to Foer are an interesting device which depicts the maturation of a young boy who is innocent of "What did you do in the war, Grandfather" and the final acknowledgement of "this is what I did."

Foer remains a silent observer for most of the novel who learns of man's inhumanity to man through these letters as the epistles become less filled with bragadoccio and humor and more eloquently realistic and filled with self-awareness and the tragedies of life.
Finally, Dr. Hungerfore mentioned that the title "Everything is Illuminated" comes from the section in which everyone in the village of Trachimbrod is making love and this love lights up the universe. But she never mentioned that when all the Jews, including grandfather's best friend Hershel, were locked in the synagogue and set on fire that these flames also illuminated the world.
Thus both love and hate can set the world on fire. Both can begin and end worlds.

I found the book(remember it was written by a 21 year old) ambitious, original, humorous, and an interesting depiction of a way of life that has disappeared forever.
Foer did not attempt to tell the story of the Jews who lived in Ukraine and the Russian Pale as it is told through films such as Fiddler on the Roof, the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel,Alan Fleishman, and Sholom Alechem. He tried an original literary technique and, of course, each reader will have to evaluate his effort individually.
But then I did not find his later books annoying either. I appreciated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because I was in New York on 9/11 and I, also do not eat meat.

What book do you all want to read next?

I liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (though I eat meat) and I expected to like Everything is Illuminated. Others had already told me how wonderful it was, so perhaps my expectations were too high.

In the end, I couldn't finish it, and, remarkably, couldn't even finish watching the movie. In part, it was for many of the reasons bearwife lists above, but mainly it was because of a pervasive sentimentality which I found oppressive.

I liked the book. I enjoyed the word play, but I found the comparison to A Clockwork Orange on the cover of my copy rather overblown. I appreciate the construction of it, the different threads of the narrative and the parallel characters throughout the narrative. I liked the metaconversation about writing that took place throughout Alex's letters, in response to Jonathan Safran Foer, the character.

Where things fell apart for me was that I was only able to muster up empathy for Alex, Jonathan, and Alex's grandfather as characters. They were the only ones who were sufficiently fully realized, in my opinion. Magical realism doesn't faze me, but I need it to be grounded in characters I believe in. Allende, for instance, makes me believe in her characters. The Trachimbrod stories didn't leave me completely cold, I did find them both funny and affecting, but as fables. I didn't get to sufficient suspension of disbelief to react to the residents of Trachimbrod as people, rather than archetypes.

I was surprised by Professor Hungerford's statement at the end of the first lecture that she thought Brod was a sympathetic and fully realized character. She was such a mannequin to me. There was a limit to her believability for me since Foer fit her within the fictional trope of the beautiful woman who is set aside from all other women and despised by them while being desired by all the men in the community. I didn't feel like I got the kind of characterization that would enable me to empathize with her. I read Alex's pleading that Brod's story be given a happy ending as a plea for a tidy, satisfying end to the story as such, rather than as a desire for a beloved character to reach happiness. Given the circumstances in which Alex is telling his own story, I can understand his desire to have something in which he is involved end well.

With respect to the title, I thought it came from Alex's mangled English, where he introduces Augustine to Jonathan and Grandfather, saying "Let us roost, and we will illuminate everything." I liked there, as a statement of the men's anticipation that finding Augustine would clarify everything for them, and (when I got to the end) as a reminder of how devastating clarity can be. And, ultimately, how...I don't want to say futile, exactly...but how seeking to clarify something often leads to more questions than it answers. I think it's one of the marks that Foer achieves some of his ambitions for the book that there are multiple layers to interpreting the title.

Memories (or strings) are what tie the characters together which Dr. Hungerford never mentioned. In fact, the word "strings" is the most repeated word in the novel.

I, too, wondered why she didn't discuss this overarching metaphor. I liked the idea, and I liked the way Foer used it as a metaphoric refrain and a means of (pun intended) tying together the story. I felt he often didn't seem to know what to do with his strings, however. The placement in the town itself was so weird and inane that it made the metaphor feel forced at times to me.

I thought the most harrowing scene was the one in which the Grandfather told his grandson how he had killed his best friend. The stream of consiousness style of dialogue was brilliantly effective and extremely poignant.

That scene, and the gypsy's revelation in the dark (not illumination at all) of what had happened to the bulldozed town. These were real diamonds in this novel, which made me think Foer has a lot of potential.

I enjoyed the word play.

I did too. Alex had an authentic voice of his own, and came through in most respects as one of the few characters with some dimension.