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Loud and lovely Mar 11, 2005 (326 of 357 found this helpful)
Sometimes an author has a theme running through all of his writing -- in the case of Jonathan Safran Foer, it seems to be a quest of the soul. His follow-up to the cult hit "Everything Is Illuminated" is the poignant, quirky, tender "Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close," which takes readers back to the rubble of ground zero.
Oskar Schell is a precocious preteen, who has been left depressed and traumatized. His father died in the September 11 attacks, leaving behind a mysterious key in an envelope with the word "Black" on it. So with the loyalty and passion that only a kid can muster, he begins to explore New York in search of that lock.
As Oskar explores Manhatten, Foer also reaches throughout history to other horrific attacks that shattered people's lives, including his traumatized grandparents. Though the book is sprinkled with letters and stories from before Oskar's time, the boy's quest is the center of the book. And when he finally finds where the key belongs, he will find out a little something about human nature as well...
Historically, only a short time has passed since 9/11, and in some ways "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" reopens the wounds. It reminds me of all the families who lost fathers, mothers and children. But Foer doesn't use cheap sentimentalism to draw in his readers, nor does he exploit the losses of September 11th families. It takes guts to write a book like this, and skill to do it well.
In some ways, this book is much like Foer's first novel, but he deftly avoids retreading old ground -- the "quest" is vastly different, the young protagonist is very different, and the conflicts and loss are different, though no less hard-hitting. Foer also sticks to that wonderfully oddballish prose, which gives a gloss of lightness to a deep plot.
After all, that is what made his first book so appealing -- there are parts of "Extremely" that are laugh-out-loud funny, and quirky characters worthy of a Wes Anderson movie. For example, one scene has Oskar sending a letter to Stephen Hawking, asking, "Can I please be your protégé?"
Child genius Oskar will probably make you want to either smack or hug him -- I tended more towards hugs. That's because Foer doesn't make Oskar seem like a tiny adult -- he's brilliant, but his mind still has the whimsy of a child's mind. His little "inventions" are just the sort of thing you'd expect an imaginative nine-year-old to create, and his quest is a realistic one, considering the tragedy he had suffered.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" proves that Jonathan Safran Foer was no one-hit wonder. His enchanting second book tackles a great tragedy with warmth, depth and sensitivity. Outstanding.
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It deverves more than 5 Mar 16, 2005 (262 of 309 found this helpful)
I just finished reading this wonderful book, and I really can't describe all the feelings swirling inside of me. This is more than a book with a story, it is an experience.
When I write my reviews I never describe the plot of the book, because Amazon does it very well, and of course other people do it in their reviews....so no need.
Well, even if I wanted to describe this book I couldn't. So again, I will just tell you why I loved it.
Mr. Foer is a wonderful writer. I had not read his first book yet, although I will do that now, but something in the description of this book caught my eye, so I tried it.
I laughed and cried and even when I was laughing, I was profoundly sad. I loved the characters and their flaws, their fears, their stories, their realistic humanity even among such unrealistic situations. I just can't describe how much I loved this book or why, but it has been put on my shelf of favorite books, to be read and reread, or experienced and experienced again. Again, it made me so sad and yet, when I was done, the sadness was mixed with such wonder and even hope. Mr. Foer, you are a marvel, to the readers, don't miss this one.
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some will hate, others love--too contrived for me Oct 16, 2005 (69 of 79 found this helpful)
Extremely Loud is one of those novels that more than most will live or die on a particular reader's personal taste. Some will find it's twinned tales of a 9-year-old's grief over his father's death on 9/11 and his grandparents' tale of woe (centering on the Dresden firebombing) incredibly moving. Others will find it typographical and textual experiments wildly stimulating (blank pages, color plates, pages of nothing but numbers, photos, etc.). And some will have no trouble suspending disbelief with regard to Oskar's incredible precociousness or the fairy-tale quality of the New York City he moves in. Others, though, will find the book sentimental rather than emotional, cloying rather than powerful. The experimentation will be gimmicky distractions that mar rather than enhance the story. And the narrator's various quirks and gifts (his tambourine play, his vocabulary, his inventions and lists of aphorisms) not only unbelievable but almost unreadable. The lucky thing is it won't take you long to figure out which reader you're going to be. If the former, you'll settle in for an enjoyable ride. If the latter, it will be a long argument with yourself over just where you'll finally give in and quit reading.
Unfortunately, I fell into the latter category. It's rare that I come across a book that can have so much good writing in it that also makes me regularly want to hurl it across the room while I claw out my eyes. In the end, ELIC was a story ruined by talent, though I couldn't decide if it was insecure talent (propping up his story with gimmicks) or self-indulgent talent (throwing in everything and anything just cause he could).
As mentioned, the story centers on young Oskar, whose father left him several phone messages before being killed on 9/11. One day Oskar finds an envelope marked "Black" with a strange key in it up in his father's closet (in typical fashion, not a normal closet but a closet with a whole host of quirky associations). Deciding "Black" is a name, Oskar then goes off on a quest to find what the key opens, attempting to interview all the Black's of NYC. Interspersed between Oskar's movements are letter written by his grandparents concerning their history, which includes the firebombing of Dresden.
Oskar's story can be moving; there are some wonderful and truly brilliant passages. But for me it was marred by both his precociousness and his preciousness. One without the other would have perhaps been simply annoying, but both together made it almost unbearable. Toss in a consistent sense of arbitrary quirkiness and the book often left a bad taste in my mouth. Oskar for instance decides to interview the Black's alphabetically rather than by geographic proximity. Why? It serves the story's purpose. When seeking clues, a storeperson tells him it's interesting his father wrote "Black" in a red pen as that's so hard to do, write the name of a color in a different color ink. Really? Has anyone ever truly had to struggle to write the name of any color when using the trusty blue or black pen? Of course not. But this sounds quirky and mysterious. And so it goes.
The grandparents' sections also have their moments of true brilliance, but are also marred by problems of credibility with regard to voice and, again, quirkiness (such as designating parts of their apartment "nothing" areas), along with typographical stunts that from my view seldom enhanced the story.
ELIC therefore was extremely frustrating rather than loud, with the sense that one could have pulled out various lines/passages and put together a truly beautiful novella, but instead the reader got this. Is there talent here? Absolutely. Can you find places that will move you or make you laugh or make you marvel at the language? Absolutely. Is it worth it for those moments? From my perspective, absolutely not. But there is so much good here that I wouldn't recommend against trying it. I
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Mostly About the Nighttime May 15, 2005 (11 of 12 found this helpful)
Mostly About Nighttime
If you've ever met somebody you thought was charming and witty and discovered after awhile that their charisma was just a cover for some deep seated anxiety, you have a sense of what it feels like to read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The book is immediately engaging, letting you into the fascinating intellect of nine year old Oskar Schell, a naïve genius in the making, whose depth of knowledge and ability to reason are incredibly profound in some areas and charmingly lacking in others, which leads us to believe we are into something warm and fuzzy with a few dark lines underneath for dramatic effect. We have no sense that by the time it's over we will have been subjected to the horrific fire bombing of Dresden, the grisly tragedy of Hiroshima, not to mention the terror of 9/11.
We are given to understand that Oskar has become the bright, articulate child he is through his relationship with his father who engages in mental and verbal games with him and who teaches his son to think outside the box. Alas, his father perishes in 9/11 setting Oskar off on a mission to affirm the validity of his father's existence by trying to find the owner of a key he discovers in the bottom of a vase hidden at the top of his father's closet.
What ensues promises to be enchanting in that old Neil Simonesque mold where all the citizens of New York are quirky and appealing and more than willing to warm up given half a chance, a view bearing about as much resemblance to reality as an MGM musical from the forties. If 9/11 taught us anything about the nature of New Yorkers it's that they are brave, industrious, bright, smart and surprisingly cohesive. But Charming is not a word that leaps immediately to mind, and Foer's insistence on resorting to this weary conceit here telegraphs a certain kind of book. What we end up with is something disturbingly different.
Lying just below the quirky exterior of these characters is a nearly universal inability to cope with grief and loss, a masochistic tendency to wallow in the tragic upheavals of their lives, compelling them to cling to others with a smothering neediness that diminishes their potential and robs them of their ability to appreciate life. Oh, joy! We keep reading on hoping that Oskar's bright naivety will lead us out of this bleak morass but instead he gets sucked in.
It's not enough that Foer sends this tornado of despair ripping across the quaint village he has created; he has to bombard us as well with first hand accounts of two of the most horrific tragedies of the twentieth century. The allied fire bombing of Dresden, Germany was destruction and death on a level with Hiroshima, and then, lest we miss the point, he gives us Hiroshima, and finishes it off with the repetitive image of a man leaping to his death from the Twin Towers.
Ultimately what we get is an attempt on the part of a New Yorker, Jonathan Safran Foer, to write his way clear of his emotions about 9/11. Oskar Schell is a metaphor for his apparently charming and naïve life pre-9/11, and the grim characters and situations that assault us afterward tell us how he's feeling now. By the time we near the end we're hoping for a resolution that will show us he's found a way out of this gloominess but the ending is half-hearted and unconvincing, although the flip book he provides does tug at your heart.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is among the first of what promise to be a slue of books about 9/11 and its meaning and impact. It's as sort of a toe in the water, testing how readers will respond to the subject, and to that extent it's valuable because we can't give shape to our feelings unless we begin to explore them. But if you're looking for a neat compartment to stow your feelings about 9/11 into, you won't find it here. Jonathan Safran Foer is still pr
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Here we go again Mar 23, 2005 (88 of 115 found this helpful)
A perceptive Amazon reviewer of Foer's last book pointed out that many of the conceits of that novel were, shall we say, "borrowed" from David Grossman's See Under: Love. It appears that Foer read this and decided: "They wanna see plagiarism? I'll show them plagiarism! Real, bare-knuckled pomo plagiarism!" The result is that this book is an EVEN MORE shameless rip-off of See Under: Love than Everything Is Illuminated was, if that's possible. To add variety to the proceedings, he also chooses to rip off Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (precocious child named Oskar who wanders through the traumas of man's inhumanity, anyone?). The point of all of this is so that the reader can say, "I laughed! I cried!" about 9/11. It's good to see that Foer is sticking to his original, successful formula of milking historical tragedy for yucks and book sales while remaining blissfully indifferent to the historical details of those tragedies: well, it's good because the emerging pattern removes any doubt that Foer has no qualms about exploiting the sympathy that naturally gravitates towards victims of tragedy to lend weight to his puerile and essentially solipsistic narrative and linguistic gymnastics. Foer is painfully inadequate to the task of grappling with the horrors amidst which we find ourselves: a close familiarity with the work of writers who patiently attend to the gritty reality and the real victims of history's traumas (Elie Wiesel, W.G. Sebald, even Kurt Vonnegut for Pete's sake) would make this clear, but the vacuous amnesia of the Eternal Media Present ensures that such familiarity is a rarity. I'm sure that deep in his heart Foer is a decent person who actually cares about the types of people his cartoonish characters are meant to represent. But this genuine decency is unfortunately marred by a number of different factors: a self-indulgent impatience with the details of history, an excessive faith in the redemptive power of his own considerable inventiveness (fueled no doubt by his success), a sensibility informed too much by bad Hollywood and not enough by good literature, a facile and predictable application of postmodern literary technique, and a public and critical establishment so starved for anything remotely serious and original in contemporary fiction that they're eager to be suckered in by shoddy pretenders to the throne.
We do the greatest service to the dead and the bereaved not by overlaying or manipulating their stories with the hyperactive antics of our own imaginations, but rather by presenting those stories with patience, respect, and the kind of self-effacement that can only be the product of the highest artistry (any fool can blunder into the scene of his subjects' suffering). I have nothing against Foer exercising his hyper-charged imagination on worlds of his own creation-but when it comes THIS world that we together share, he merely adds to the din drowning out the actual voices of those lost and haunted by loss.