"Everything is Illuminated"--not so much

The first few pages of the novel "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer were guffaw-out-loud funny, they being written from the point of view of a Yiddish narrator, Alex, in awkwardly formal English peppered with colloquial idioms. "I had performed recklessly well in my second year of English at university. This was a very majestic thing I did because my instructor was having shit between his brains." But I'm barely 30 pages in and I need to put it down because it's just all over the place. After the Yid-glish intro, it went into a story about a newborn child that floated to the surface of a river after a horse-drawn cart with her parents careened into the drink. Then it described a ceremony by Jewish elders who held ceremonies to determine her fate. There was chanting and shouting and general chaos, and finally I just couldn't do it. I tried, but I think I need something with a straightforward story & sequence to process right now. I'll have to come back to it. I'm just going to rent the movie with Elijah Wood in it and finish "In a Sunburnt Country" by Bill Bryson, a hilarious account of his sojourn through the country/continent of Australia. I had to chortle when he described the unfortunate event of an Aussie Prime Minister's drowning as "The Swim That Needs No Towel." I got halfway thru a couple months ago (was reading 3 of his books at the same time and got B.B. overload even though his writing absolutely drives me to tears) and retreived it from under my bed the other day. I looked like a damn fool in the park during lunch yesterday shaking with laughter while reading it. Try it, you'll like it. Even love it.