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A review by missmansanas
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
5.0
Trivia: I only read Everything Is Illuminated because I thought it might help me understand and appreciate Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close better. Only, I ended up loving the former. The latter, now, has made it to my shelf of favorites.
I picked up the book because it was widely acclaimed on the Internet, particularly one blogger that I admired and respected. The first few pages were difficult, but it was easier to pick up and fall in love with than EII. I was sucked into the poetic melody of the pages, and I often felt my heart was either singing, crying, or both. The feeling was addicting. I wanted it to go on and on.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell adored his father. So when Thomas Schell dies that fateful day, Oskar has to face the abrupt, terrifying change in his life. One day, he stumbles upon a key in his father’s closet and, not yet ready to let go, decides to go on a hunt for the lock that it opens.
Sometimes I get lost in the story and live more on the way it is told. It reads like poetry sometimes, which is why some people might (and do) down it as being “pretentious”. The book takes a certain openness of heart and mind to appreciate it. One must have a relationship with poetry, an acceptance of things that don’t make sense and allowing them to exist such that they don’t make sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense.
I don’t have favorite characters in this book, but the closest I have are Oskar’s grandparents. In the beginning, Grandma seemed to be a minor character: someone who loved and cared for Oskar, and vice versa. As the story travelled through letters and daybooks, I realized it may have been her story all along. Her love for and with her husband was enchanting, somewhat void of description.
It was the very idea that someone’s past might be this incredibly large other-world that you may not know of, that may change your idea of that person if you knew. Without her story, she’s just Grandma. But when her past came and caught up to her, it was like she became a youth again. She was a protagonist of her story again.
Like EII, I appreciate Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close more for its philosophical nature and less for its actual work of fiction. That was important too, because our basic aim in reading is to know what happens next. But in this book there was always the underlying question of Why? Why did that happen? Why them? Why in that manner?
The questions don’t get answered. Nobody’s questions really get answered. Some questions don’t even get asked. But the mystery of life is that we keep on asking, and we keep on hoping for the chance to ask. As I learned in philosophy class today, that’s what it means to live a life that’s alive. To be in the moment, to feel everything all at once, to submerge and to immerse.
In the end, I wish I could swallow this book. If not, I wish I could memorize its frames, structures, words from beginning to end. That way, I’d always have the feeling with me. The infiniteness of the moment. I wish Oskar would survive his battles, that his mother would love him aloud, and that his grandparents would find the words that they are looking for. I wish that they find it in them to forgive life.
“…it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”
I picked up the book because it was widely acclaimed on the Internet, particularly one blogger that I admired and respected. The first few pages were difficult, but it was easier to pick up and fall in love with than EII. I was sucked into the poetic melody of the pages, and I often felt my heart was either singing, crying, or both. The feeling was addicting. I wanted it to go on and on.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell adored his father. So when Thomas Schell dies that fateful day, Oskar has to face the abrupt, terrifying change in his life. One day, he stumbles upon a key in his father’s closet and, not yet ready to let go, decides to go on a hunt for the lock that it opens.
Sometimes I get lost in the story and live more on the way it is told. It reads like poetry sometimes, which is why some people might (and do) down it as being “pretentious”. The book takes a certain openness of heart and mind to appreciate it. One must have a relationship with poetry, an acceptance of things that don’t make sense and allowing them to exist such that they don’t make sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense.
I don’t have favorite characters in this book, but the closest I have are Oskar’s grandparents. In the beginning, Grandma seemed to be a minor character: someone who loved and cared for Oskar, and vice versa. As the story travelled through letters and daybooks, I realized it may have been her story all along. Her love for and with her husband was enchanting, somewhat void of description.
It was the very idea that someone’s past might be this incredibly large other-world that you may not know of, that may change your idea of that person if you knew. Without her story, she’s just Grandma. But when her past came and caught up to her, it was like she became a youth again. She was a protagonist of her story again.
Like EII, I appreciate Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close more for its philosophical nature and less for its actual work of fiction. That was important too, because our basic aim in reading is to know what happens next. But in this book there was always the underlying question of Why? Why did that happen? Why them? Why in that manner?
The questions don’t get answered. Nobody’s questions really get answered. Some questions don’t even get asked. But the mystery of life is that we keep on asking, and we keep on hoping for the chance to ask. As I learned in philosophy class today, that’s what it means to live a life that’s alive. To be in the moment, to feel everything all at once, to submerge and to immerse.
In the end, I wish I could swallow this book. If not, I wish I could memorize its frames, structures, words from beginning to end. That way, I’d always have the feeling with me. The infiniteness of the moment. I wish Oskar would survive his battles, that his mother would love him aloud, and that his grandparents would find the words that they are looking for. I wish that they find it in them to forgive life.
“…it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”