book review extremely loud and incredibly close

As Oskar roams New York City, he encounters a motley assortment of people who are all survivors in their own way.

What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm.

His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.Īn inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. (Apr.Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. 11-city author tour foreign rights sold in 12 countries. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. Was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's 'charring effect.' It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. , Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden.

Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated , is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE Jonathan Safran Foer A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review. A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality.

Book review extremely loud and incredibly close