With it's tipped in plates and beautiful end papers I think this book is a bibliophile's dream. Being a big fan of Cornell's work I was very impressed and pleased with the overall packaging, which I find to be quite lovely, and the quality of the writing. Finally I was really impressed when I found out that the editor put it all together while he was still in college. I think this is a great book for fans of Joseph Cornell's boxes.

I received this book from an old friend who I hadn't seen in nearly twenty years--she showed up unannounced, spent a few hours sitting in the sun, and then disappeared just as unexpectedly. I still don't know if she meant to leave the book behind, but I've decided that I won't give it up. Cornell's boxes have a strange beauty that seems to attract strange birds--deceptively simple, at first you barely realize how quickly you can slip into these lost, overlooked, forgotten worlds that seem hum along according to an amusingly skewed logic. Many of the stories and poems show writers who've successfully crossed over and have sent back postcards filled with the fresh and unfamiliar voices of travellers far from home.

IÂ'm a huge Joseph Cornell fan, and own every book that has anything to do with him. This is the best! Not only are the images beautiful and plentiful (and many new to me), but the stories and poems are so unbelievably entertaining and different from one another. IÂ've never seen a book quite like this one, and IÂ'm going to give a copy to everyone I know!

From the advance hype of this book, I had gotten the impression that Foer was the budding savior of American literature. Indeed, the excerpt printed in the New Yorker two years ago was very entertaining, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Alas, that excerpt was the very best part of the book. No doubt, pseudo-intellectuals will try to convince us that Everything Is Illuminated reveals the impossibility of textualizing a catastrophic event such as the Holocaust and forming cross-cultural and multigenerational blah blah blah. The fact is, great authors have done all of that and more; Jonathan Safran Foer does not. Strangely, Foer's refusal to form a plot does not prevent him from indulging in sentimental pontification or preachy dialogue (sample: "I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is"). Apparently, we're all supposed to sit back and think, "Whoa, dude, that's deep." I'm not having it. The early chapters are engaging, but Foer wanders off early and never comes back. One clever narrative trick cannot sustain a novel. Those interested in actual literary depth concerning the Holocaust may wish to read the novels or stories of Arnost Lustig.

Yes, I'm jealous. As a sometimes poet, frustrated novelist, and English teacher, I can't help but be jealous of Foer's achievement. His praise is well-deserved; he has managed to make a page turner out of a complex story with complex philosophical musings. There are loose ends to the story (unless I missed something), but life has loose ends -- that is real. The juxtaposition of this reality with the magic realism is intriguing and raises important questions about the relative importance of truth and the imagination. Of course there is humor in Alex's endearing attempts to use thesaurus-burdened words to seem more "intelligent," but perhaps equally important is the fact that his inability to get connotations of words helps the reader to see the irony in the subjects he discusses. My experience with the book may be different, since I listened to the audio version (my first experience with audiobooks)and the speaker who read Alex's sections added a wonderfully engaging accent. Yes, there were times when I had to rewind and listen again to get the pronoun references, and I felt frustrated that I didn't have the book in front of me to savor passages (I may buy it yet). But I was late to many an appointment and sat in the garage for many minutes each time I got home, because I couldn't bear to turn off the story, the humor, the sadness, the wisdom of what I was hearing. This book is fascinating, and if I were teaching at the college level I would consider adding it to my curriculum. The students would love me for it.

For many reasons, I love this book. Much of the story is narrated by Alex, a Ukranian youth, who speaks English "fluidly" and is charged with the duty, by his father who runs Heritage Tours, of translating for the fictional Jonathan Safran Foer on his journey through the Ukraine in search of the elusive Augustine - the woman believed to have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis. Alex's grandfather is their driver, although he is blind (only, perhaps, from a broken heart). They are accompanied by his seeing eye dog, Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr., whose amorous antics add a Marx Brothers quality to this cast of characters. But, there are two other stories interwoven with Alex's narration. There is the correspondence between Jonathan and Alex and the folklore, reaching back to the 1700s, which tells the story of the village in which Jonathan's ancestors once lived. What is so amazing to me about this book, given the author's age, are the sensibilities expressed by him - the impact of history, truth, connectedness, remembrance, friendship, betrayal - it is written with true heart, insight, wisdom and irony - something that I might, if I'm lucky, experience from someone with many more years of living. The book is exhilerating, heartbreaking to the point of tears, and laugh out loud funny to the point of shaking my head thinking "I can't believe he said that." The book is a remarkable journey and an amazing achievement.