extremely loud and incredibly close - a review'ish

I finally finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I was sad to see it go because it's been a good friend these last few months, sitting on my night stand, sometimes on top of other books, sometimes under them, sometimes with a glass of water on it, or a cup of tea. I was only able to digest it in small doses. I put the it down to read other books in the last three months. I read, The Road Less Travelled, Edward Bond's Lear, The Sun Also Rises, Trout Fishing in America, The Dharma Bums, Letters to a Young Poet, The Art of Happyness, The Crying of Lot 49, The British Abroad - The Grand Tour, and 4 Shakespeare Plays. None of which I've felt compelled to blog about. Im not sure why this is, but I wrote the person who recommended this book to me on October 10th and said that "if ever there was a book that was written for the sole purpose of making a grown man cry it would be this on," and I meant it.

The book evokes an emotional response based upon a few basic triggers. There's the dad son relationship thing that always gets me. There's the 9/11 thing that of course is sad. There's the impossible love story. The tortured artist. The scared kid. The grieving wife. The grieving mother. The grieving everybody. The more I write about these things now though, the more I feel tricked. And I guess that's something that I must have picked up on earlier when I wrote that line to a friend - that the book feels somewhat contrived. If I was to make a list of everything that I could think of to get an emotion out of somebody, it would include the things I just listed. This should make me upset. I should feel tricked, and in some ways I do, but Jonathan Safran Foer's greatest accomplishment in my opinion, is that a person can read this book knowing all of these things and not care. Which is to say that it doesn't get in the way.

And it's not all sad, there's mystery, and there's adventure, and discovery, and colorful writing, and incredible witticisms from a clever nine year old. Oskar (the protagonist) is my hero. Maybe it's because, like Oskar I read as far as I could into A Brief History of Time when I was younger, and had to put it down partly because the math was getting too hard, and partly because it was giving me to much anxiety. Maybe its because he's incredibly funny, and I wish I could have come up with the line "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." Whatever the reason, I'm not embarrassed to say that I want to be like a nine year old, and though I'm sure it will give you heavy boots to read it, as it did me, i highly recommend it.

cheers,
nate