Review by Mark Flanagan, About.com
Oskar Schell plays the tambourine. He also makes jewelry, collects coins, studies French, writes informed letters to renowned scientists, and obsessively invents. When we first meet the precocious nine year old narrator from Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he is beset with another sleepless night of inventing:
"What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of 'Yellow Submarine,' which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which is a French expression that I know."
Oskar's intelligence, sensitivity, and cultural awareness belies his young age, so much so as to garner Foer criticism for having built his latest novel around an unrealistic protagonist.
Sure, Oskar's consistent stream of brilliant deliberation makes his nine year old character a bit cartoonish, but it also makes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a fascinating catalog of ideas laid out in narrative form. And much more.
The novel is set in post-9/11 Manhattan, the tragedy in which Oskar lost his father, Thomas Schell. One year later, Oskar makes an odd discovery in his father's clothes closet: a small key in a tiny envelope upon which is inscribed the name (or word) "Black." Though hardly a smoking gun of any sort, Oskar finds in this discovery just the sort of diversion he needs to sustain him in his time of loss, to fill the void left by the loss of his father:
"I decided I would meet every person in New York with the last name Black. Even if it was relatively insignificant, it was something, and I needed to do something, like sharks, who die if they don't swim, which I know about."
And so begins Oskar's great New York oddysey. Determined to visit the 216 Black households in the five boroughs, he cancels his weekend French classes and unbeknownst to his mother proceeds on foot about the city meeting Blacks from Aaron and Abbey to Ada and Agnes, and so on.
Oskar's narration of his mysterious quest make up roughly a third of the novel. Alternating chapters are narrated in epistle form by Oskar's grandmother and grandfather, his father's parents.
In chapters titled, "Why I'm Not Where You Are," Oskar's grandfather writes numerous autobiographically apologetic letters to his son explaining his reasons for returning to Germany prior to Thomas Schell's birth. He is a survivor of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden, whose voice was inexplicably taken from him shortly after his arrival in America, and he consequently dependsentirely upon his writing to communicate with others. Oskar's Grandfather writes as obsessively as Oskar invents.
The chapters entitled "My Feelings" are a typed for Oskar by his grandmother, and similarly recount her German childhood as well as her adult life with and without Oskar's grandfather.
Reviewers have already likened Oskar Schell to other lone young men of literature - Huck Finn, Holden Caufield, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recalls nothing so much as Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated, each a threefold narrative in which epistle plays an central role, each centered around monumental historical tragedy and loss of life (the Holocaust and the attacks of September 11), and each driven by a character in search of family against a backdrop of concurrently unfolding family history.
I won't fault Foer for these similarities or assume he's incapable of writing anything else. Time will tell.
Similar also is his ability to infuse the exploration of the disquieting themes of war, loss, and absence with buoyancy and humor. Like the narrator of Everything is Illuminated, Oskar's voice is distinctively funny and his thoughts unique, making it often a great pleasure to be wandering around New York inside his head. By contrast, Foer elicits from the tales of Oskar's grandparents surprising truth and poignancy for a young novelist.
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer again proves his ability to evoke wonder and beauty from the ashes of the most heartbreaking and senseless deeds of humanity.
http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/extremelyLoud.htm
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