Guest Review: Jonathan Safran Foer's Latest
We're always happy to offer advance reading copies to our Patron Passport members. In some cases, we're so spot-on in picking the patron that we run the risk of giving away a copy to the only patron who will ever want to read the book.
That's not the case with today's reviewed book. Jon Faith has put a lot of effort into this review, but all we ask of you when we give you a galley, proof, or advance reader copy is that you give us a quick one-paragraph review of the book.
Jonathan Safran Foer soars with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Without further ado, here is patron Jon Faith's take on this new novel:
The events of September 11, 2001 have been avoided by and large by literary fiction. How would one represent that sense of panic, that desperate heroism that colored that sunny Tuesday? Somehow Pete Hamill’s maudlin, Gumpish depiction at the conclusion of his novel Forever resonated with an insulting thud. The tragic nature of that day’s events both undermined our national hubris and fatally punctured the patina of security which had previously reminded us to be wary of pit bulls, genetically modified food and internet chat rooms. Suddenly no one is safe and literature has been slow to approach this untimely dilemma. Jonathan Safran Foer has warily climbed to the task, with a move that many might find fraught with the confidence of youth. He burst upon the literary stage in 2002 with Everything Is Illuminated, smoldering tale of love, memory and the Holocaust.
His second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close personalizes the tragedy through the use of a precocious child protagonist, named Oskar, who spends the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in a near autistic torrent of information, slowly coming to terms with his father’s death and his mother’s apparent distance. Foer unrolls Oskar’s investigation of his father’s last days alongside a parallel narrative which explains that Oskar’s grandparents survived the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War and attempted to explain and codify that “survival” with varying success ever since.
Foer’s characters are an odd ensemble: the protagonist is reminiscent of Mark Haddon’s autistic detective and the grandfather is but a ghost and struck me as being similar to Edward Wallant’s Pawnbroker. The text is laden with photographs and different colored passages, effects sagely employed and worthy of a tradition from Lawrence Sterne to W.G. Sebald. Foer’s prose is bereft of jingoistic admonishment; its terrain is only populated with the affected. The novel is masterful in depoliticizing tragedy and fermenting a mixture of history’s atrocity within the unlimited basin of the imagination.
That's not the case with today's reviewed book. Jon Faith has put a lot of effort into this review, but all we ask of you when we give you a galley, proof, or advance reader copy is that you give us a quick one-paragraph review of the book.
Jonathan Safran Foer soars with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Without further ado, here is patron Jon Faith's take on this new novel:
The events of September 11, 2001 have been avoided by and large by literary fiction. How would one represent that sense of panic, that desperate heroism that colored that sunny Tuesday? Somehow Pete Hamill’s maudlin, Gumpish depiction at the conclusion of his novel Forever resonated with an insulting thud. The tragic nature of that day’s events both undermined our national hubris and fatally punctured the patina of security which had previously reminded us to be wary of pit bulls, genetically modified food and internet chat rooms. Suddenly no one is safe and literature has been slow to approach this untimely dilemma. Jonathan Safran Foer has warily climbed to the task, with a move that many might find fraught with the confidence of youth. He burst upon the literary stage in 2002 with Everything Is Illuminated, smoldering tale of love, memory and the Holocaust.
His second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close personalizes the tragedy through the use of a precocious child protagonist, named Oskar, who spends the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in a near autistic torrent of information, slowly coming to terms with his father’s death and his mother’s apparent distance. Foer unrolls Oskar’s investigation of his father’s last days alongside a parallel narrative which explains that Oskar’s grandparents survived the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War and attempted to explain and codify that “survival” with varying success ever since.
Foer’s characters are an odd ensemble: the protagonist is reminiscent of Mark Haddon’s autistic detective and the grandfather is but a ghost and struck me as being similar to Edward Wallant’s Pawnbroker. The text is laden with photographs and different colored passages, effects sagely employed and worthy of a tradition from Lawrence Sterne to W.G. Sebald. Foer’s prose is bereft of jingoistic admonishment; its terrain is only populated with the affected. The novel is masterful in depoliticizing tragedy and fermenting a mixture of history’s atrocity within the unlimited basin of the imagination.
posted by All4Word at 1:29 PM
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