With the much-anticipated arrival of the Oscar nominated film adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I wanted to bring attention back to Jonathan Safran Foer’s original novel that gave life to the new Hollywood version. The film is being advertised as a movie about September 11th and it is true that this is literature born out of a society drastically changed by 9/11. But the specific events of that morning take a backseat in this story. The real crux of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is more then a tale of the one heart wrenching tragedy that changed the world we live in.
The novel follows the quest of nine-year old Oskar Schell to resolve the grief of his father’s death – through the search for a box which only one key can open. This search is part of a ‘Reconnaissance Expedition’ Oskar and his Dad created and hadmbeen left unresolved before his father was killed. Oskar is an eccentric kid. He wears only white, plays his tambourine incessantly and spouts a cornucopia of internet trivia. As a child he is not entirely believable – a tad too precocious, a touch too insightful, but as a narrator he is an engrossingly quirky and touching creature. Through his eyes we are introduced to a world full of oddities, tragedies and fancies. Many of them are virtual, some of them are imagined and a few are painfully material.
Foer employs a stunning range of linguistic and narrative devices, not to mention extensive use of ‘visual writing’. There are pages with only one sentence, and others crammed with so many words that the paper turns an impenetrable black. The final pages of the book show images of a falling man flying upwards, but the representation is limited, both by the number of pages and the available footage. Safran Foer confronts his own aesthetic challenge – how to honour a grief that seems infinite in a confined artistic space through a consistent and powerful saturation of his text.
This is one of those rare books that will change how you look at life and you will want to read it over and over again. It challenges not only what it means to be alive but what it means to be novel or a piece of literature. You will find yourself laughing as Oskar marches literally to the beat of his own tambourine, and you will cry as he struggles with the concept of death.