In the first ASTU lesson, we started to read the novel called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book talks about one tragic story of a family in post-9-11. The boy named Oskar Schell has lost his father during this tragedy and he suffered a lot from that. He had extreme difficulties facing his father sudden death and somehow developed kind of symptom of PTSD, such as irrational thought and obsession of his father. Personally, I think Oskar is a weird kid. In the book,Oskar was portrayed as a mind wondering boy who is always inventing things. He was extremely curious about everything that is related to his father and he tried to find out how his father die, which is literally impossible at that time. Moreover, he abreacted his irrational anger of his father’s death on his mother. I believe Oskar is a character with more infection than Naomi, the girl we read in Obasan.

This book implicitly reflect the negative effect of war on terror. We can easily see that terrorism has the power to distort a kid’s psychological well-being. By using a small group of people, Oskar’s family, to reflect the situation of a larger society, Jonathan has made this book compelling and realistic. However, I found out that not every people is perfectly aware of it at that time. I was grade 4 when this tragedy happened, but I haven’t realize the seriousness of that event until I started my high school and I was not the minority that was unaware. Perhaps I was in China and the information faded when it got into our ears. What I heard the most at that time is about American economy’s fluctuation. All people were talking about is how America was going to react economically and how their own country was going to benefit, rather than showing their concern to families and children who were traumatized. Only when I finished the book, I realized how influential terrorism is, especially on children. It is quite revealing that people sometime cares more about what can they gain and ignores the well-being of the other’s.

Apart from the sociological perspective, I also found the book very intriguing. The difference between the novel I read before and this novel is that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is not novel that consist of only English characters in line. There was plenty of other element in this novel, such as letters Oksar wrote, interesting illustration. Some illustrations in the book seems to be totally irrelevant to the text, but somehow I can actually feel the implicit connecting in between.