Extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan foer

[Emmers00]

Extremely loud and incredibly close by Jonathan Foer, I get the feeling this book was supposed to be a tear-jerker. The plot is grief ridden adolescent Oskar Schell is trying to cope with his dad’s death in 9/11, through gathering facts to help him make sense of things. When he finds a key in his dad’s closet with the word Black it sets him on a quest to find out what it means.

I’m definitely one to cry at sad movies, songs, books you name it, but when something sad did happen in this book (a child dealing with grief over a lost parent) it was then put right next graphic swearing or random inappropriate facts with no use to the story. Pair that with creepy excerpts of letters sent from his grandparents to Oskar and his father detailing the couple’s relationship, early lives, and sex lives. Seriously. No grandson wants to read that, NOBODY wants to read that.

There were one or two moments I thought were great, one truly beautiful poetic letter from Grandpa, meeting the 103 year old man that was sweet. But Oskar was the problem, I get he’s a kid and sad and somewhere on the spectrum. But he’s a terrible person. I sympathized with him for obvious reasons (when he lost his dad) and almost cried when I read this 10 year old self harmed. But the other 99% of the time I wanted to set the book on fire.

The things I really wanted to explain to him 1. Don’t look up sexual terms on Google (why? Just why?). 2. Don’t tell your mom you wish she would’ve died. 3. Don’t go around NEW YORK talking to and going into strangers apartments. Ugh.

I usually enjoy metaphorical and deep ponderings of life in books, and can most of the time understand poetic type things. I will compare this book to an abstract sculpture I saw at a museum some time ago, it was literally a huge glob of what looked to be melted metal on the floor, titled “meat”. That is what this book does to me.

And sure this book may have been beautiful; Foer’s style is actually lovely, very vivid and filled with artistic lines and metaphors. But whatever meaning this story had was lost to me because of the lewdness immediately following, which to me makes the author sound totally immature, and untrustworthy. It could’ve been great, but it wasn’t.