Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

I never really noticed it, but I was reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close on the week of 9/11. It's been a good 8 years since I saw that event covered live on TV, and I don't have to live in NYC to know how heart wrenching it must've been.

Foer's follow up to the successful and witty (in a broken English kind of way) Everything Is Illuminated, is a conversation between 3 persons who has lost someone they love in 9/11. Two parents and a son. You'd smile as how a 9-year old would invent things and ask silly questions, then probably be saddened on how a father would grieve to leave his son.



It's a quest, a diary, and a vivid monologue packed in 300 pages of imagery and text. Claims have been made, lauding it as one of the great 9/11 stories. Haven't really read much books about the tragedy, but, in capturing the heartache borne by people at such a young age, this novel comes, as it says, incredibly close.

3 talkbacks:

monsterboy said...

The book was on my 2007 reading list.

http://ronniegatsby.blogspot.com/2007/07/august-is-book-shopping-month.html

Took forever to find it.

Anonymous said...

ron how did this book fare? i'm checkin for a next read at fullybooked later.

monsterboy said...

quite well i must say!
it's a nice sober account of 9/11. it's an improvement from the first book, definitely.