Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is a book that is interesting to discuss not so much in terms of whether you liked it or not, but by looking closely at how intricately, unusually, and unexpectedly it is constructed.
It was the first serious book in English I ever started reading. Yes, it was a somewhat strange choice, given how demanding it is: the language, the unusual structure, several interwoven stories, unconventional layout, fragments of sentences, letters, notes, photographs, and all kinds of play with the text. At times, Foer deliberately makes the book physically difficult to read — the text breaks apart into isolated phrases or becomes almost impenetrable.
The book was recommended by a polyglot friend of mine who speaks six languages. The goal was quite specific: to improve my English. A good book, good language, reading in the original — so I got down to it. It soon became clear, though, that this particular book was going to be somewhat more complicated.
This is the story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who loses his father, Thomas, in the tragedy of September 11. After Thomas’s death, Oskar finds a key among his belongings, marked “Black,” and decides that, no matter what, he has to find the lock it belongs to. He makes his way across New York, meeting dozens of people with the last name Black, and gradually becomes immersed in their stories.
There is something both detective-like and utterly childlike about his quest: if he can find the lock that fits the key, perhaps he will learn something important about his father. And if he can learn something important about his father, perhaps it will become a little easier to live with the fact that he is gone.
Oskar is looking for a way to stay connected to his father, and I think this is where he feels most real to me. He doesn’t know how to grieve through silent suffering; instead, he turns his grief into action. He makes up a route through New York, walks into strangers’ apartments, asks questions, collects photographs and stories. It seems that he simply needs to keep doing something — anything — rather than be left alone with the realization that his father is no longer there.
Foer uses a particularly interesting device throughout the novel: he constantly places a child’s way of thinking alongside an adult catastrophe. Oskar thinks in ways that are at once remarkably intelligent and completely childlike. He can reason about death, physics, languages, and inventions, yet his emotional logic can be utterly literal. That is why some of his actions feel funny, irritating, and terribly sad all at once.
Formally, the book is about the tragedy of September 11, but in reality, it reaches far beyond it. It is a book about the impossibility of getting answers, survivor’s guilt, a child’s attempt to rationalize the unbearable, and the way trauma can be passed down from one generation to the next.
Why “across generations,” you may ask? Because another family enters the story: Oskar’s grandparents and their son Thomas, Oskar’s father. It turns out that Oskar’s story of trauma began long before September 11. His grandparents are German immigrants, and the story of their love and the life that followed is deeply tragic. During the bombing of Dresden, Oskar’s grandfather loses the woman he loves, Anna. He later marries her sister, but never truly escapes his first loss. He almost stops speaking altogether, communicating through notes that often contain nothing but “Yes” or “No,” as though, after everything he has lived through, words themselves have become almost impossible.
It was the first serious book in English I ever started reading. Yes, it was a somewhat strange choice, given how demanding it is: the language, the unusual structure, several interwoven stories, unconventional layout, fragments of sentences, letters, notes, photographs, and all kinds of play with the text. At times, Foer deliberately makes the book physically difficult to read — the text breaks apart into isolated phrases or becomes almost impenetrable.
The book was recommended by a polyglot friend of mine who speaks six languages. The goal was quite specific: to improve my English. A good book, good language, reading in the original — so I got down to it. It soon became clear, though, that this particular book was going to be somewhat more complicated.
This is the story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who loses his father, Thomas, in the tragedy of September 11. After Thomas’s death, Oskar finds a key among his belongings, marked “Black,” and decides that, no matter what, he has to find the lock it belongs to. He makes his way across New York, meeting dozens of people with the last name Black, and gradually becomes immersed in their stories.
There is something both detective-like and utterly childlike about his quest: if he can find the lock that fits the key, perhaps he will learn something important about his father. And if he can learn something important about his father, perhaps it will become a little easier to live with the fact that he is gone.
Oskar is looking for a way to stay connected to his father, and I think this is where he feels most real to me. He doesn’t know how to grieve through silent suffering; instead, he turns his grief into action. He makes up a route through New York, walks into strangers’ apartments, asks questions, collects photographs and stories. It seems that he simply needs to keep doing something — anything — rather than be left alone with the realization that his father is no longer there.
Foer uses a particularly interesting device throughout the novel: he constantly places a child’s way of thinking alongside an adult catastrophe. Oskar thinks in ways that are at once remarkably intelligent and completely childlike. He can reason about death, physics, languages, and inventions, yet his emotional logic can be utterly literal. That is why some of his actions feel funny, irritating, and terribly sad all at once.
Formally, the book is about the tragedy of September 11, but in reality, it reaches far beyond it. It is a book about the impossibility of getting answers, survivor’s guilt, a child’s attempt to rationalize the unbearable, and the way trauma can be passed down from one generation to the next.
Why “across generations,” you may ask? Because another family enters the story: Oskar’s grandparents and their son Thomas, Oskar’s father. It turns out that Oskar’s story of trauma began long before September 11. His grandparents are German immigrants, and the story of their love and the life that followed is deeply tragic. During the bombing of Dresden, Oskar’s grandfather loses the woman he loves, Anna. He later marries her sister, but never truly escapes his first loss. He almost stops speaking altogether, communicating through notes that often contain nothing but “Yes” or “No,” as though, after everything he has lived through, words themselves have become almost impossible.
Perhaps that is why there are so many things in this book that seem strange at first. Blank pages, for example, or pages with almost nothing on them. There is an entire sequence of pages where a single short sentence or question sits alone in the middle of an otherwise completely blank page.
And it is not simply a matter of “beautiful design.” These are Oskar’s grandfather’s notes. He has almost lost the ability to speak, so when Foer places a page like this in the book, we are literally given one of his notes.
In one episode, Oskar’s grandfather discovers his grandmother’s manuscript, titled My Life. She had been typing it for years, but at some point he had removed the ribbon from the typewriter. Her eyesight was so poor that she never noticed. She thought she was writing down her life, but nothing was actually appearing on the page.
Toward the end of one of the grandfather’s sections, the text begins to grow denser. The lines draw closer together, the words pile up, until several pages almost become a solid block of black. The words suddenly become so tightly packed that they are almost impossible to read.
Foer’s construction is remarkably subtle:
the grandmother cannot express her life → we see blank pages.
the grandfather tries to express too much → the pages become almost unreadable.
In both cases, language ultimately fails. In one, it fails through absence; in the other, through excess. And this captures something essential about trauma: a person may be unable to say anything at all, or may have so much to say that what is spoken ceases to function as a message and loses its meaning.
The grandmother writes her life. The grandfather writes letters to his son. Oskar searches for a key. And in essence, they are all doing the same impossible thing: trying to continue their relationships with those who are no longer there.
The trauma of loss cannot simply be lived through and left behind.
In one episode, Oskar’s grandfather discovers his grandmother’s manuscript, titled My Life. She had been typing it for years, but at some point he had removed the ribbon from the typewriter. Her eyesight was so poor that she never noticed. She thought she was writing down her life, but nothing was actually appearing on the page.
Toward the end of one of the grandfather’s sections, the text begins to grow denser. The lines draw closer together, the words pile up, until several pages almost become a solid block of black. The words suddenly become so tightly packed that they are almost impossible to read.
Foer’s construction is remarkably subtle:
the grandmother cannot express her life → we see blank pages.
the grandfather tries to express too much → the pages become almost unreadable.
In both cases, language ultimately fails. In one, it fails through absence; in the other, through excess. And this captures something essential about trauma: a person may be unable to say anything at all, or may have so much to say that what is spoken ceases to function as a message and loses its meaning.
The grandmother writes her life. The grandfather writes letters to his son. Oskar searches for a key. And in essence, they are all doing the same impossible thing: trying to continue their relationships with those who are no longer there.
The trauma of loss cannot simply be lived through and left behind.
This is not simply an “experimental way of telling a story.” In a sense, the book itself gradually begins to behave like traumatized memory: it can no longer tell the story in a conventional way, and instead gives us fragments, repetitions, gaps, and the inability to speak.
In the printed edition, there is a final sequence of photographs of a falling man that can be flipped through in reverse — and then, for a moment, it seems as though he is not falling, but rising back up. When something unbearable happens to a person, ordinary language may simply not be enough. What remains are photographs, objects, other people’s stories, strange little actions. There is a mysterious key, and there is the hope that if you keep searching long enough, you might eventually find an explanation somewhere.
But in the end, no. Oskar cannot find a way to bring his father back. His grandfather cannot bring Anna back. None of them can rewrite what has already happened.
And yet, while reading, you get this strange feeling that perhaps a person does not always need an explanation. Sometimes, perhaps, you simply need to keep moving. To someone’s house down the street. Then to another street. Then somewhere else. To talk to strangers. To keep things. To reread letters. To remember. And then, one day, to discover that you are still living.
Oskar begins with the idea: “If I find what this key opens, I’ll understand what happened to Dad.” But by the end, he gradually realizes that there is no explanation that can bring his father back.
I began this book to get a feel for the language, and finished it with a rather strange feeling — as though I had been entrusted with someone else’s very fragile family story. Time and distance do nothing to diminish it: events separated by decades and continents remain incredibly close and continue to sound extremely loud in the memory of several generations.
