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brianreynolds
Sep 05, 2013brianreynolds rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
The quest for a person's family history contains within it both a curiosity and a vanity that I have never fully understood or appreciated. That said, Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel <i>Everything Is Illuminated</i> appealed to me mainly on the basis of the humour in translator Alex's fractured English and the pathos of the Holocaust revisited. In the end, since Alex's facility to communicate improved as the book progressed and the horror of Nazi atrocities became surreal without some sort of historical or plot-driven substance, the cleverness of the typography and language became increasingly distracting. The characters became decreasingly interesting. The irony became progressively uncomfortable and, unfortunately, regressively wrenching.