Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
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Book Reviews of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
Book Review: Extremely clever and incredibly moving; possibly the best novel I've ever read...
Summary: 5 Stars
If you gave Chuck Palahniuk the writing talent of Michael Chabon and had him rewrite J.D. Salinger's `The Catcher in the Rye' using his uniquely strange character development and giving it a poignantly modern facelift, you may come out with a novel as brilliant as `Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'; maybe. I know that this is a heavy amount of praise to tag onto one particular book, especially a book that was written this past decade (not like the `classic' status has been earned yet), but when you consider the fact that up until this point the greatest book I'd ever read was `The Road' (and I don't think even purist are going to argue that Cormac McCarthy's modern masterpiece is undeserving of the endless heaps of praise it garners), it shouldn't be too surprising.
I mean, it shouldn't matter WHEN a book was written, just how well it was written, and this book is written flawlessly!
The concept behind `Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' is an endearing one. The story revolves around a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His life is thrust upside down, and he begins to slowly unravel. Bad enough that his father died, but Oskar Schell carries with him a dark and disturbing secret about that day, a secret he has shared with no one but continually reminds himself of. It is eating him alive (and when it is revealed it will eat you alive as well). Oskar is a bright young boy, and a highly imaginative one (not to mention an oddly mature one, like a male Dakota Fanning) and this serves as the focal point of Foer's narrative. When Oskar finds a blue vase at the tip top shelf of his fathers closet that contains an envelope baring a strange key and the word `Black' written in red ink, he becomes intrigued. He thinks of the games he and his father used to play and he decides to discover what this key belongs to, hoping that it will bring him closer to his father.
Written in a very engaging way, using photographs and letters and flashbacks to illuminate more than just Oskar's present but his past and eventual future as well, `Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' is a true treasure in written form. I have never been so engulfed in a particular novel (I plowed through this in 2 days, and it only took me that long because I needed to work). In fact, I'm aching to read it a second time.
Far from just a gimmicky novel, Foer's masterpiece really understands Oskar. This is a hard feat beings that Oskar is so young and conveying the identity of a child not yet out of the single digits can be quite the undertaking. If you mature him too much be feels fake but if you make him too childish you will take out the dramatics needed to really embellish the story. Foer remarkably finds a great balance, giving Oskar a maturity beyond his years but underlining its origin (he's suffered so much and has been forced to mature quickly) and being careful to litter his character with enough childish actions to establish his age.
Using 9/11 as a backdrop was risky, but it pays off for Foer. Instead of making this a novel ABOUT 9/11, he merely underscores the travesty of Oskar's predicament by plating it alongside a memorable disaster in human history. He thus relates Oskar to us before we even get to know him fully. The novel though, is not about terrorism or about that fateful day at all, but it is about the bond between a father and son that is unbreakable and the lengths one will go to in order to keep that bond alive. It also beautifully highlights the paternal love and naïve understanding that helps create the family dynamic. The ruptured affections that dwell within Oskar and his mother are heartbreakingly real, and Oskar's childish assumptions about his mothers own feelings are very real and only make his development all the more understandable.
In the end, I strongly recommend this fantastic novel. It is controversial, sure, but it is also richly rewarding!
Book Review: Living with loss
Summary: 5 Stars
As Nicole Krauss had done in THE HISTORY OF LOVE, Foer writes a moving fable about the legacy of loss that connects across three generations. Precocious nine-year-old Oskar Schell has lost his father in the World Trade Center, and sets out to find the significance of a mysterious key he has secretly found among his possessions. Other voices in the novel turn out to be those of Oskar's grandparents, survivors of the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 and traumatized by the loss of their own loved ones. Oskar's wanderings also bring him into brief contact with a variety of New Yorkers with losses of their own; these encounters are by turns strange, sad, and even amusing, but all are written with a sense of wonder.
Foer combines these voices with a stylistic virtuosity that includes rapid shifts in time, numerous typographical oddities, blank or almost-blank pages, blurry photographs, and even sections in color. While these devices often work brilliantly, I found that the author's cleverness could sometimes become annoying, his fables could be stretched a little thin, and his nine-year-old get a little TOO precocious. But Oskar is a wonderful character for all that. Whenever he is our guide, he makes an exhilarating and touching companion, and he leads us to an ending that ties the various threads together in a way that is both satisfying and consoling.
A number of recent books share features with Foer's work; I would call the context postmodern, but that is too highbrow a word to describe a style that, at its best, is childlike and unpretentious. Of course there is Foer's own EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. I mentioned Nicole Krauss' THE HISTORY OF LOVE; she and Foer are husband and wife. There is also Dara Horn's THE WORLD TO COME, which covers a similar span from pre-Holocaust Europe to modern New York, though with an even more fabulist approach. Foer's use of short stories to illuminate a larger canvas owes a lot to earlier New York writers such as Paul Auster. Other reviews have pointed out Foer's debt to Kurt Vonnegut, in subject matter and technique. The situation of Oskar's character, with his surprising pockets of intelligence, trying to make sense of the adult world is a little like that of the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, though in a very different context. And surely the choice of Oskar's name, together with the fact that he goes everywhere playing a tambourine, is a tribute to the hero of THE TIN DRUM by Gunter Grass, one of the first books to use childhood fantasy to unlock the horrific legacy of wartime Europe. Any of these authors is well worth investigating by those who have enjoyed Foer.
[It is also interesting to compare this to Don DeLillo's more recent FALLING MAN. Both authors are fascinated by the same image, though DeLillo deals with it entirely through words, and in a more realistic style. But both realize that the events of 9/11/01 were but the start of a pervasive malaise that remains with us to this day.]
Book Review: A whimsical world amplifying a very real tragedy
Summary: 5 Stars
Oscar Schell, the 9-year old protagonist and narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is quite a character. He's a little obnoxious, a little bratty, a little nerdy. He's not stupid (his idol is Stephen Hawking), but he is blind to many of the subtleties and nuances of the (so-called) adult world. In other words, he is much like real-life nine year olds we see today (albeit a precocious one). Sheltered and bookish, he has trouble fitting in with his peers, and spends much of his time writing letters to people like Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall, among others.
The difference is that young Oscar has already had to face a great tragedy; his father was one of the victims of 9/11, and Oscar answered what was probably his father's last phone call home. Foer does a good job of not making Oscar's emotions seem too caked-on or over-the-top, while letting his devastation shine through the narrative. Oscar may be ahead of his peers in terms of reading comprehension, but his imagination is still that of a child, retreating into "feel good" inventions like ambulances that broadcast goodbyes to the families of victims as they pass (or heartfelt "I love you"'s for fatalities). There are a few heartbreaking scenes when the reader is jarringly reminded that inside his solemn attempts at adulthood, there is a very real child who just wants his father back.
Oscar has little to do with his time (other than only wearing white shirts, giving himself bruises, and compiling images in a book of his life), which is why the discovery of a mysterious envelope marked 'BLACK' in his father's personal effects gives a new focus to his life. Oscar is determined that this envelope, containing an unidentified key, is the final clue in his father's last "treasure hunt" for him, and sets out on a quest to survey every Black in the phone book, from A to Z.
On the way he meets a host of quirky characters; a man who keeps a catalogue of people (one per notecard, with exactly one descriptor each), a woman with a photo of an elephant on her refrigerator, a man who communicates only with commonplace books and a pair of "YES" and "NO" tattoos, a couple who keep "museums" of each other, a woman who secretly lives on the top floor of the building she works at, and many more. Foer's characters are too whimsical to actually exist, yet they still have very human reactions and emotions that keep them rooted in some sort of common reality.
Alongside Oscar's search is a parallel story that delves into his family history. This side plot seems slightly convoluted and unrealistic, but Foer's innovative use of creative gimmicks and the sincerity of the story makes it just as heartbreaking and entertaining as Oscar's tale.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is not fully a "realistic" story, nor is it meant to be. The characters, situations, and ideas are kept just slightly outside the fringes of the world we know, giving it an otherworldly feeling. At the same time, however, the genuine emotions and landmarks (particularly the 9/11 incident) keep it grounded in real-life America, and this effect is quite stunning. The characters are purposely made whimsical to maximize a range of real emotions that remain sincere no matter how strange their surroundings become. A beautiful novel that you will keep thinking about after it ends, and that will resonate with every core emotion you possess.
Book Review: Extremely moving and incredibly beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
I hadn't read Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, but we loved the film version of Everything Is Illuminated, so I was intrigued to check out Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I found it extremely moving and incredibly beautiful. I savored every word of it, often smiling or crying or both. Foer's story centers on Oskar, a 9-year old boy coming to grips with the loss of his father in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and what makes the story so transcendant is Foer's marvelously authentic first-person narrative, making the reader see and understand the world as such a boy would see it. I certainly saw flashes of my godson in him. Just as children sometimes in their innocence, undefiled by hackneyed turns of speech, will come up with superbly fresh metaphors and honest turns of phrase, the prose of Oskar's narrative is brimming with that kind of beauty and integrity. He's a precocious boy who's constantly coming up with inventions, and writing letters to all manner of people from Jane Goodall to Stephen Hawking. As a boy will, his narration occasionally veers into fantasy without warning, only to be regrounded by "well, that's what I wished I had done, what I really did was..." Oskar deals with his grief by embarking on a unique quest to systematically visit every person in New York named Black, searching for the lock that goes to an unusual key he found in his father's closet. His story is interleaved with the story of his grandparents, who both survived the Dresden bombing and re-met years later in New York. Most of their story comes out in letters they write to their son and to their godson, and it is often poignant to hear how two people can recall the same experience so differently. Their lives unfold in a timeline that jumps from their meeting in New York, to the present day, back to their childhood in Dresden, and back again, a chronological jumble that makes perfect emotional sense. In the fullness of the story we come to see how the events in their lives all relate, and how character traits may be a legacy between a grandfather, the son he never met, and his grandson. (It's only been in recent years I've come to appreciate how much of my parents are in me. I just wonder how Foer, who is much younger than me, came to be so wise about these things.)
I gather that the print version of this book made integral use of photos and graphics that I missed by listening to the audiobook. But I have to say that the readers of this audiobook did a splendid job. There were multiple actors voicing the main characters, and I think they really brought the characters to life. That's no mean trick, as Foer's characters are vivid and somehow authentic and slightly surreal at the same time. He has managed to create a world very like New York, but where the laws of time and reality are sometimes fluid, and which is somehow all the more real for that. His work reminds of the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. And reading this book was certainly a magical experience.
Book Review: Extremely moving and Incredibly well written...
Summary: 5 Stars
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer, is the touching story of an nine-year-old boy grieving for his father, Thomas Schell, who was killed on September 11th. While it sounds like a dire proposition for a novel, the story is so well narrated from the point of view of young Oskar, that it is a delight to read. I couldn't put it down. Our hero is on a mission, one to find out about a key he's found that he believes will not only unlock something important, but also the answers to questions about his father, bringing him closer to his memory.
He proceeds by going through the entire list of persons named Black in the NY city phone directory, creating all sorts of personal challenges and adventures and causing him to meet and hear the histories of countless new people. One of the men, who ironically happens to live upstairs in his building, assists him in his task and becomes close, a bonus for both the lonely old man and this lost youngster.
Character development seems to be Mr. Foer's strength. Oskar's relationship to his grandmother is an endearing part of the tale. She lends him the support he needs at such a terrifying time in his young life. The author does an excellent job with emotions and relationships, especially the grandmother and her husband. These are characters with whom the reader can emphasize. "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness," his grandmother writes. And that pretty much sums up the novel. While many of them are acting from a mode of self-protection, they still manage to find joy.
I decided to read this novel after finishing Nicole Krause's "History of Love." I had heard that her husband, the author of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" wrote a story very similar to the one Ms. Krause wrote. Curious, I wanted to compare the novels. It's almost as if the husband and wife writers sat at the dinner table one evening and challenged themselves with a theme of loss and love, giving themselves similar guideposts (such as the original love interest must have a four letter name beginning and ending in "A", there should be a quirky old man and a young child who has lost a father, a mother who is not quite present for the child, there should be numerous writers in the stories, a mystery to solve, and so forth.) One might think this would make for a boring read of the second book, but it made it incredibly interesting to compare the two.
As for who won the challenge? Well, in my opinion, although I loved "The History of Love", Mr. Foer won. The story is more clearly told, not nearly as confusing as Nicole Krause's tale. Oskar's viewpoint and his interest in inventing things (some of which are hilarious), his blunt questions of his "subjects," and the clear portrait of his brilliant and devoted father through stories he told and his memories make it a moving story that you won't be able to put down.