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Summary
Summary
A funny, uplifting novel about a boy's journey through New York in the aftermath of September 11th from one of today's most celebrated writers.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell embarks on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts of an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey. With humor, tenderness, and awe, Jonathan Safran Foer confronts the traumas of our country's difficult history.
Author Notes
Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977) is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). He was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University.
In 2000, Foer was awarded the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Prize and in 2007 he was included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists.
His forthcoming nonfiction book is entitled, Eating Animals. His title Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close made The N.Y. Times Best Seller List for 2012.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naively precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. Agent, Nicole Aragi. 11-city author tour; foreign rights sold in 12 countries. (Apr. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Oskar Schell is not your average nine-year-old. A budding inventor, he spends his time imagining wonderful creations. He also collects random photographs for his scrapbook and sends letters to scientists. When his father dies in the World Trade Center collapse, Oskar shifts his boundless energy to a quest for answers. He finds a key hidden in his father's things that doesn't fit any lock in their New York City apartment; its container is labeled "Black." Using flawless kid logic, Oskar sets out to speak to everyone in New York City with the last name of Black. A retired journalist who keeps a card catalog with entries for everyone he's ever met is just one of the colorful characters the boy meets. As in Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton, 2002), Foer takes a dark subject and works in offbeat humor with puns and wordplay. But Extremely Loud pushes further with the inclusion of photographs, illustrations, and mild experiments in typography reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (Dell, 1973). The humor works as a deceptive, glitzy cover for a fairly serious tale about loss and recovery. For balance, Foer includes the subplot of Oskar's grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden. Although this story is not quite as evocative as Oskar's, it does carry forward and connect firmly to the rest of the novel. The two stories finally intersect in a powerful conclusion that will make even the most jaded hearts fall.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
Oskar Schell is like any nine-year-old, except that he is tumbling through grief over his father's death in the attack on the World Trade Center. As his mind races to outpace reality, Oskar sets out on the ultimate scavenger hunt through New York City to discover more about a key he finds among his father's belongings. As with his debut, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer employs colliding time lines. Here Oskar's grandparents inch toward "living" through emotional letters that release the horrors of their Dresden childhood. Only Oskar's mother remains a remote caregiver for most of the novel. Throughout, Foer nimbly explores the misunderstandings that compound when grief silences its victims. It's hard to believe that such an inherently sad story could be so entertaining, but Foer's writing lightens the load. Oskar's rolling chatter, punctuated by stinging declarations, is often welcome comic relief. Oskar is alive, and as he invents a safer world in his head and among all those he touches, he's also learning to live. Foer's excellent second novel vibrates with the details of a current tragedy but successfully explores the universal questions that trauma brings on its floodtide. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/04.]-Rebecca Miller, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
What The?What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dads voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons dtre, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, Id train it to say, "Wasnt me!" every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, "Ce ntais pas moi!" What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyones heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyones hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but dont really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldnt have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans dont have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt? Anyway. My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self- defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining, so my first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, and we all had on neat white robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native American style, and then Sensei Mark asked me to go over to him. "Kick my privates," he told me. That made me feel self-conscious. "Excusez-moi?" I told him. He spread his legs and told me, "I want you to kick my privates as hard as you can." He put his hands at his sides, and took a breath in, and closed his eyes, and thats how I knew that actually he meant business. "Jose," I told him, and inside I was thinking, What the? He told me, "Go on, guy. Destroy my privates." "Destroy your privates?" With his eyes still closed he cracked up a lot and said, "You couldnt destroy my privates if you tried. Thats whats going on here. This is a demonstration of the well-trained bodys abil Excerpted from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.