Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Image Courtesy of http://www.jonathansafranfoer.com
Author	Jonathan Safran Foer
Cover artist	Jon Gray
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin
Publication date	1 April 2005 (1st edition)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	368 pp (hardback & paperback editions)
ISBN	[[Special:BookSources/ISBN+0-618-32970-6+%28hardback+edition%29%3Cbr%3EISBN+0-618-71165-1+%28paperback+edition%29 |ISBN 0-618-32970-6 (hardback edition) ISBN 0-618-71165-1 (paperback edition)]]
OCLC	57319795
Dewey Decimal	813/.6 22
LC Class	PS3606.O38 E97 2005
Preceded by	Everything Is Illuminated

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Two years before the story begins, Oskar's father dies on 9/11. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father that inspires him to search Manhattan for information about the key. The main character shares many stylistic similarities (and first name) with Oskar Matzerath from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, most notably his constant carrying of a tambourine in place of Grass' drum. The book is seen as an example of visual writing, utilizing typesetting, images, spaces and even blank pages to give the book a visual dimension beyond the prose narrative.

Narration

The main narrator of the story is a nine year old child, Oskar Schell, an intellectually curious and sensitive child of Manhattan progressives. He is vegan, musical (he plays the tambourine), a pacifist, academically inclined, and above all, earnest. Two additional narrators, Oskar's paternal grandparents, tell the story of their childhood, courtship, marriage, and separation before the birth of Oskar's father; much of their story is presented in epistolary form, as a series of letters addressed to Oskar or his father.

Images in the story

Throughout the novel, Foer uses images as a literary technique. These images connect to ideas and themes as well as emotions and perspectives alluded to on earlier pages. Oskar visits a woman and sees a picture of an elephant's eye. Images of the woman and picture as they would be seen from Oskar's perspective appear on the adjacent pages. At one point, while out hunting for clues to the meaning of the key, Oskar searches through a test pad for pens in an art supply store. These pages of the pad with brightly colored ink are inserted into the novel. Most notably, there are time-lapse pictures of a falling man (one of the "Jumpers" from 9/11) spread out around the book.

The last fifteen pages of Foer's text comprise a flip-book collection of the images of the falling man in reverse order so that he seems to be falling upwards toward the top of the World Trade Center. Oskar views that the falling man may possibly being his father, who died in the September 11 attacks. At the end of the book, Oskar imagines his father's last actions starting before he may have jumped from the North Tower and extending back to the night before September 11 when he tucked Oskar into bed. On page 325, Foer writes in the voice of Oskar, now a ten-year-old boy, "...I found the pictures of the falling body. I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky." Foer was not the first to describe the falling man as "floating"; however, he was the first to show the image in such a manner.

September 11 in the novel's plot

This is one of the first American works of fiction to incorporate the attacks of September 11, 2001, as a pivotal theme in its plot. The use of reality is a crucial aspect that affects all elements of the novel. Another important theme stressed in the novel, which seems to correlate with Oskar's desire for more information about his father, is a key Oskar finds in an envelope that had been in a vase he accidentally knocked over. The key causes him to embark on a hunt for a solution to the great mystery of the key's provenance. In addition to the September 11 attacks and the mysterious key, other significant elements of the novel's plot and emotional themes include: answering machine recordings made by Oskar's father on September 11, the life stories of Oskar's grandparents who came from Dresden, the diverse history and population of New York City, and Oskar's hobby of writing letters to famous people, most notably Stephen Hawking.

Similarities to Foer's first novel

There are some similarities between this novel and Foer's first one, Everything Is Illuminated. Both of the stories are told from three different points of view which are not all in the same timeline. In the beginning of both novels, it is difficult to see how these different story lines will merge in the end. A large role is given to the paternal grandfathers who are in both novels curious characters who cannot exist outside of the novel. The main characters' quests in the books are to find out something about some deceased family member, and both times it is these quests that are the start of the story. However, the discoveries that are made are most unexpected and disappointing to the characters who are looking for something that they think is important about their family members' pasts. Both back stories are somehow related to the Second World War: In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the bombing of Dresden is vitally important to the main character's grandparents; in Everything Is Illuminated, it is the grandfather's flight from a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine before the Nazis arrive that is important. Additionally, Oskar's precociousness and his quest are similar to that of Alma Singer in The History of Love, a novel also published in 2005 by Nicole Krauss, Foer's wife.

Criticism

Critical response towards Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has been generally less positive than for Foer's first novel; John Updike, writing for The New Yorker, found the second novel to be: "thinner, overextended, and sentimentally watery", stating that "the book’s hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama". In a New York Times review Michiko Kakutani claimed that:

While it contains moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity that attest to Mr. Foer's myriad gifts as a writer, the novel as a whole feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard.

Kakutani also stated the book was "cloying" and identified the unsympathetic main character as a major issue. Harry Siegel, writing in the New York Press bluntly titled his review of the book "Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False: Why the author of Everything Is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack," seeing Foer as an opportunist taking advantage of 9/11 "to make things important, to get paid". Anis Shivani made similar claims in a Huffington Post article entitled "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers", wherein he claims that Foer "Rode the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, giving us a nine-year-old with the brain of a--twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer".

Adaptations

A one-night engagement of a Literature to Life production based on the novel by special arrangement with The American Place Theatre was presented and hosted by Baylor University Theatre in Waco, Texas on September 15, 2006. The script of the one-actor production was taken directly from the text of Foer's novel. The production starred theatrical and film actress Haley March, a 2000 alumna of Baylor University. Wynn Handman adapted and directed the production. The production was preceded by a 15-minute pre-show discussion and followed by a 15-minute post-show discussion.

A film adaptation of the novel is currently in the works. The script has been written by Eric Roth (screenwriter of Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and director Stephen Daldry (director of The Hours and The Reader) is reportedly attached to the project. Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are attached to star in the film, alongside 2010 Jeopardy! Kids Week top winner Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell. Although Oscar is nine years old in the book, Horn was 12 at the time of his casting. The film is set to be released in 2012.

See also

• September 11, 2001 attacks in popular culture

External links

• Interview of Foer following release of novel, Mother Jones Magazine, May/June 2005.
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at IMDb