"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 naïvely 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."
Here we go, turn the page.
3 comments:
You guys know I usually read pretty quickly - but with all the moving stuff, I fear it'll be another month before I've read this one. Sorry!
I won't recap my entire review of the book. You can read it here if you want. I'm hoping others of you read this book as well, because it sure would be interesting to talk about.
I can't figure out why it took me so long to read it, myself. I think it was the 9/11 story. I was avoiding it. I actually picked it up a month (or so) ago and read a few chapters, but I was still hesitant. But finding myself trapped in an airplane for 90 minutes on a hot tarmac with nothing else to read ultimately provided the right incentive. And once I finally got into it, I couldn't put it down. I even snuck it to work, shut my door, and read it during my lunch break.
I enjoyed it immensely. I can see, though, that it's not for everyone. Foer takes chances and makes some decisions that I think would irritate some readers. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't irritate me as well, but what can I say? Maybe I see in Foer something that I wished I saw more in myself: a great writer who is bold and courageous and not afraid to head down the unconventional path.
I'll tell you what it wasn't, though: a fun book. Great writing is one thing, but the subject matter brought the mood down quite a bit. Not to say it was all doom and gloom. It had its brighter moments and, I thought, a good ending. But over all, it was a little depressing.
So after all that, I'm very glad I read it, but I don't think I'll be revisiting it again. It's not a book I feel the urge to re-read. Having said that, however, I picked up his other book this morning (Everything's Illuminated, presumably just as uplifting, this time about the Holocaust) and I'm already two chapters in. The guy's just a good writer. I think anyone struggling to be a writer themselves should check it out to see what he can do.
Crap crap crap. I have the book somewhere, but I can't find it after the move. I have every intention of reading it soon (if just to move my turn one step closer) I'll find it this weekend and get to it. Sorry Craig, I feel bad.
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