Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Published 2002 · 79,200 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is Everything Is Illuminated to read?
Everything Is Illuminated scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- One narrator writes in deliberately broken, thesaurus-driven English, which is its own load.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Two contrasting styles, one mangled and one lyrical, alternating.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete village life and magical-realist abstraction in the same book.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Two centuries of invented history alongside the present-day journey.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Two unreliable narrators writing to each other, both editing what they tell.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The shtetl chronicle is built almost entirely from recurring symbols.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- The comic English of the letters sits against the horror they eventually deliver.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The central historical question is answered only partially, and painfully.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Three interleaved strands — letters, novel-within-novel, and travelogue — in different voices.
How Everything Is Illuminated is regarded
Everything Is Illuminated holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.