Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close

When I first saw that our English teacher was standing up there, in front of us, holding a pile of papers while saying with a convinced smiled: “Well, I’m going to give you an extract from a book entitled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which deals with 9/11 '', I said to myself: “God bless me for having chosen the seat next to the window...”  Well, that was my first reaction about Jonathan Safran Foer's book, but it changed.

 

Oskar, the narrator, a young boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks

Then, we were given 3 excerpts from this novel published in 2006 (thereby issued 5 years after the 9/11 attacks) and we studied them. First of all, we examined the blurb on the back cover ( i.e. the short summary of the whole book), which is totally suspenseful (thanks to suspension points, question marks, etc.) and reflects the work, whose chapters often end with cliffhangers. When I read the 1st extract, which is at the very beginning of the novel, I felt like “Wah, that’s extremely strange and incredibly stunning”. And that goes on with the two other passages (that confirmed this first impression by the way) in which we learn a little bit more about Oskar’s experiences with this devastating catastrophe for a child and about his relationship with his father. Indeed, readers are completely immersed in a nine-year-old boy's world, Oskar, fatherless because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hence, out of doubt, he developed such a sharp imagination and limitless creativity, which makes him so touching and stirring. (He makes up words such as “Birdseed shirt” that you have to decipher in a way. He goes even further by imagining unwonted machines or building floors that come to you, waiting in an immobile elevator.) 

As a matter of fact, Oskar’s way of telling this tragedy under his own steam, is as moving as if he were a grown up, able to put words on his feelings and his grief. In the third and last text we studied and read in class (the teacher wasn’t going to be a spoiler after all, we wanted to know by ourselves), we found some mysterious elements again that appeared in the blurb and that is really puzzling: who is the man Oskar is confiding his past in, something he has never told anyone before, and why? How did he meet him? Well, I guess we have to read the whole book in order to fill our insatiable curiosity. Or for lazy people, at least, to see the film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry in 2011…