Bleh

Not surprising, but Jonathan Safran Foer, confirms all the negative ideas I have of him. I really wanted to like Everything Is Illuminated, everyone raved about it; my geeky friends had crushes on the guy, he was the "it" boy of the literary world. So when I finally read Everything Is Illuminated, I felt cheated. The book wasn't bad, per se, but it wasn't good. In fact it felt incredibly contrived and inauthentic. The way Foer wrote about love and friendship, the use of his heritage (Ukrainian Jewish) felt like a manipulation in order for him to use magical realism, not as an authentic voice. In fact the first time I read it, I convinced myself I liked it well enough. It took me recommending the book to someone, watching the film adaptation (which I actually liked, at least the first part), and reading his other book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I hated, naive musings of a wunderkind that urges all of us to be pacifist, retching inducing really), to re-read the book and realize how horrible it was. I mean there were some things that I loved about it, some passages spoke to me. However, the second time I read the book it crystallized for me that behind all that style, was a lot shallow assumptions about the world.

Afterthoughts: I meant to write a post about all the things I hated about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I found a draft an some notes - but not enough to write anything substantial.
- The Dresden bombings are not the same as the 9/11 attack. The devastation of Dresden has been exaggerated. The moral equivalence is pretty disgusting.
- Books with precocious little kids annoy me. He isn't that brilliant and his use of "raison d'etre" and other quirks is frankly pretentious and distracting.
- The last image that Foer uses at the end (a body falling out of the World Trade Center in reverse), is deeply offensive - a whimsical wish, a child's fantasy in the face of true evil. That's where the book ultimately fails for me, no amount of flip book magic can return the world to what it was before 9/11.