I went into reading this book with apprehension. The first bit of it seemed extremely confusing to me and the plot jumped back and forth. However, once I got a hang of it, I fell into the characters and their experiences. Foer's writing style is absolutely magnificent and unique. I love his rendition of the war from a small town's point of view, not just your usual Number the Stars-type World War II novel. I don't even know what else to say. This book almost made me cry, and barely anything does that. Please read this! You will love it so much! ( )

De verhalen van de Oekraïense gids en van de Amerikaanse gast van de gids gaan steeds meer door elkaar lopen. De joodse familie van Safran Foer heeft in een dorpje gewoond dat van de aardbodem verdwenen is. De grootvader van de gids heeft zijn eigen verhaal van de oorlog, dat hij uiteindelijk aan zijn kleinzoon en Safran Foer durft te vertellen.
Ironie, consequent belabberde vertaling (maar ook weer geestig) van de Oekraïense gids, joodse verhalen vol onverklaarbare gebeurtenissen. Een geweldig boek!

A seemingly light novel about not so light themes, Foer does a successful job of being funny and moving at the same time. A young Jewish American (named after the author, Foer) goes to Ukraine in search of a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. There is only an old photograph, and the name of an obscure village, to go by. He enlists the services of a tour company, and he is given a quirky old man as driver and his grandson, as translator, plus a dog with a personality. While the main theme is the search, the novel is actually a tapestry of stories of several characters spanning several generations. These are put together through letters between Foer and Alex (the translator), a sincere, if a bit naive young man who writes horrendous but immensely funny English, memories of the grandfather, and the plot of a story that Foer is writing.

I enjoyed this story, not just because of Alex's laugh-out-loud way of expressing himself in English, but because of its element of magico-realism. There is a dream-like quality to the events and the characters who lived in the village before the war destroyed it forever. The novel evokes a haunting, nostalgic feeling, but there is an underlying sadness in the recurrent themes of love, desire, happiness, destruction, and loss. The novel, in fact, turns out not to be a funny and light one. ( )

(unabridged audiobook): This is the story of Jonathan the American and Alex the Ukrainian, who are both writing novels and sharing them with each other chapter by chapter. The stories switch off regularly: first a portion of Alex's novel about his time working as translator for Jonathan as they journey through Ukraine looking for a woman who saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis during WWII. Next is a chapter from Jonathan's novel about his ancestors in Ukraine. Lastly is a letter from Alex to Jonathan to discuss their novels-in-progress. There were two readers: one playing Alex and reading his novel and letters, and the other reading Jonathan's novel. Alex's frequent malapropisms are quite funny, in no small part due to the talented reader, but the back-and-forth of translation often leads to an obnoxious amount of repetition. Jonathan's novel is, sadly, a complete waste of time. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the awkward, boring reader and how much is simply overwrought prose. ( )