Hello readers,
It’s not very often that I describe a book as being “curious”. I believe such personification requires a truly deserving novel, but I don’t think there is a book more deserving of the description than Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. His novel is set in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade center in New York City.Written from three perspectives, it follows the story of a nine year old boy named Oskar, his grandmother, and his grandfather. Foer’s novel is bursting with curiosity, mostly towards the key he found in his father’s closet in an envelope labeled “Black”. This discovery sends him on a quest around New York to find the lock that the key fits, hoping it will reveal something that could keep him close to his father after his death. But when I use the term “curious” I don’t only mean it in the sense that the characters had questions they wanted answered. I also use it to describe the situations that the characters find themselves in: The grandfather’s inability to speak, the grandmother lying about her “crummy eyes” and her life story of blank pages, the small connection of everyone with the last name “Black”, the “something” and “nothing” spaces grandma and grandpa created around their house, and Oskar’s array of unique inventions.Each of these situations leaves the reader asking so many questions, and leaves them forever, and frustratingly, curious.
Oskar’s inventions remain a theme throughout the book, showing up at times when he feels emotional and vulnerable. As I was reading the novel I began to view his inventions as one of his coping mechanisms- a way to take his mind off of the stress and grief of losing his father. When Oskar invents, he is inventing ways that he can improve the world, or make other people’s lives better. A number of his inventions involve ambulances, ones that tell you if the person inside them will be okay, and even one long enough to stretch from a house to the hospital. I think these represent Oskar’s fear of loss, and his desperate want to fix things. In the last paragraph of the novel, Oskar imagines what would have happened if his father hadn’t gone into work that day, he says “He would’ve gotten back into bed, the alarm would’ve rung backward, he would have dreamt backward. He would’ve gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day. …He would have been safe”.
Foer’s novel left me more curious than I’ve been in a while. I fell in love with his style of writing, and I look forward to reading his other books. I hope you all enjoyed the book as much as I did, and continue to check in as I analyze it more.
Talk to you soon!
Mia Spare