What I found particularly interesting was Safran Foer’s decision to interweave the Dresden bombing into the storyline. Personally, I do not have a problem with this: it’s part of Western history now, so why not write about it? Incorporating the event into fiction also helps us to look at it in new and revealing ways, to examine aspects we might not have considered before. There’s no doubt that this is a clever and engaging book, one of the first novels to feature 9/11, for which the author received much flack. But they were, essentially, welcome relief from Oskar’s unrelenting smart alecky (is that a word?) voice. Their sections are narrated via letters, which I found a little confusing to begin with.
There’s also a dual narrative revolving around Oskar’s grandparents, German immigrants, who survived the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War.
In the process he unwittingly discovers a family secret kept hidden for almost 50 years. He launches an investigation of Sherlockian proportions, which takes him across the five boroughs of New York, to find out what lock the key might open. In the meantime, Oskar also finds a blue vase hidden away in his father’s wardrobe that contains a key in a small envelope marked ‘Black’. This is the big burden he shoulders, because he wants to come clean about this but isn’t sure how to do it. Oskar came home to find several messages on the answerphone from his father but could not bear to let his mother hear them, so he kept the phone and replaced it with a new version of the same model so she wouldn’t be suspicious.
The premise of the story is this: Oskar’s father died in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. OSKAR SCHELL: INVENTOR, JEWELRY DESIGNER, JEWELRY FABRICATOR, AMATEUR ENTOMOLOGIST, FRANCOPHILE, VEGAN, ORIGAMIST, PACIFIST, PERCUSSIONIST, AMATEUR ASTRONOMER, COMPUTER CONSULTANT, AMATEUR ARCHAEOLOGIST, COLLECTOR OF: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things. This business card, which Oskar hands out to acquaintances, might give you some indication of the boy’s huge annoyance factor: I fell into the latter camp, although I have to admit that the main narrator, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, irritated the hell out of me because he was just so damned precocious. Judging by the reviews I have seen online, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is definitely one of those books you either loathe or love. Fiction – paperback Penguin 368 pages 2006.
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