May 28th, 2007
Review – Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
I received this book as a gift from a friend (thanks Map) and knew nothing about it when it arrived. The front of the book has a red hand with the name of the book and the author’s name along with the words “a novel”. The back of the book has two reviews. The inside front jacket has another short blurb and a summary of the book. The inside back jacket has the required picture of the author and a brief biography. Now take my advice. Don’t read the blurb… it gives too much away. This book is best read as a blank slate. That is how I read it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although maybe enjoyed isn’t the right word. Wait. This doesn’t seem like much of a review. Let me start again.
This book is about autism, and the World Trade Center, and family, and the bombing of Dresden, and learning to live with loss, and learning to forgive. The book is about people who have been broken… broken by their experiences in a cruel world full of fear and hatred. But they learn to cope with their pain by searching for meaning in their loss. That is what Foer uses as the basis to build this amazing story. The first chapter of the book starts with the words, “What about a teakettle?” By the end of the first chapter I was hooked. I turn to a random page and find these words:
I thought, I’m the one who’s supposed to be crying.”Don’t cry,” I told her. “Why not?” she asked. “Because,” I told her. “Because what?” she asked. Since I didn’t know why she was crying, I couldn’t think of a reason.
And these:
At first I thought I’d walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me…
It is so well written and although the story is really a fairy tale more than a novel, the characters are so real and so believable in their pain that the whole thing holds together beautifully. This is a book that I treasure having read.
