Book review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Posted by Joe on: 06.20.2008 /

Oskar Schell is an extremely bright 9 year old boy with an incredible appetite for seeking out knowledge. He is also completely broken since his father was killed in the Twin Towers. He wanders through the novel in the ‘heavy boots’ of grief, unsure of what happiness even means any more.

Oskar and his father Thomas had a very special relationship. Often Thomas would set Oskar special puzzles.

For the last one we ever did, which never finished, he gave me a map of Central Park. I said, “And?” And he said, “And what?” I said “What are the clues?” He said, “Who said there had to be any clues?” “There are always clues.” “That doesn’t, in itself, suggest anything.” “Not a single clue?” He said, “Unless no clues is a clue.” “Is no clues a clue?” He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that.

I spent all day walking around the park, looking for something that might tell me something, but the problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for.

A year after his father’s death, Oskar finds a mysterious object hidden by his father and takes it to be a clue, so sets off on a quest across the city, meeting a series of strange people along the way.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is an amazing novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, quite possibly one of the best I’ve ever read.

I don’t want to say that it perfectly encompasses the confusion of post-modern living - but it does. Many of us feel like we are set in a park with few clues, struggling to make sense of the little bits of twisted metal we find along the way. Many of us feel like we’ve lost something incredibly important and that without it, life makes no sense. Reading this book in the cafe of a large food store this morning, watching and listening whilst people filled their trolleys with brightly coloured boxes, I really got the feeling of isolation and aloneness. That the world makes no sense and that we’re too busy rushing around filling trolleys to notice.

I know that people often say that the journey is more important than the destination, that conversation is more important than conclusion. But I’m tired of journeying and I want to go home.