Heavy Boots

"Did you know that in the last 3500 years there have been only 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world?"

Even if it means two posts in one day (sigh, this is addicting, isn't it?) I need to throw down some thoughts about the book I just finished, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is one of the first fiction novels written in response to 9/11 and is just brilliant! It follows a young boy's (Oskar) stream of consciousness as he tries to track down clues left behind by his father who died in the terrorist attacks. Though at first a little confusing, I eventually fell into the odd rhythm of the writing which doesn't decipher the important from the unimportant; namely, written in first person, Oskar tells everything he sees, smells, hears, tastes, touches, so it is up to the reader to determine what is essential to the plot. The author used photographs, blank pages, and other illustrations to add to the text, which was a really artistic way of incorporating the reader's imagination into the pages of the novel. One of my favorite passages is in a letter from his grandfather describing his wife's desire to learn English idioms from magazines, books, brochures, etc. Day after day of bringing things home for her, "my shoulders burned with English, she wanted more English so I brought a suitcase, I filled it until I could barely zip the zipper, the suitcase sagged with English, my arms burned with English, my hands did, my knuckles, people must have thought I was actually going somewhere, the next morning my back ached with English." I love that passage. I imagine this young man stumbling home, ready to unleash the weight of sentences, phrases, words. I see words and letters tumbling out of the suitcase, free of context and eager to be consumed. That's how this entire novel is: structure-free but eager for individual interpretation and universal understanding. Oskar is a character to learn from. Especially in the last few pages where he takes images of a man falling from a building and reverses them so that the man appears to be "floating," reading this book inspired me to channel curiosity and optimism in the worst of situations. It was a beautiful read.

Watching the world as if it were a TV,
R-