WARNING: EARNEST REVIEW AHEAD. Very genuine and emotional and generally gross.
I love Jonathan Safran Foer. I love him even though chances seem high that he is quite pretentious (have you read that New York Times piece made up of email correspondence between Natalie Portman and himself? Perma-cringe). I love him even though I’ve only read two of his books and may never read more than that. I love him even though absolutely the only thing I care to know about him is his writing.
When someone writes the way he does, there’s no response to have, for me, other than that.
The flaws of his books - characters and scenes that can border on the fantastical, a pervasive feeling of try-hard-iness (to coin a word) - are so easily overlooked. Not even, actually. I fell and fall so deeply in love with his writing that these things seem like positives too.
I like that our main character, Oskar Schell, feels a tad too big and vibrant for the world. It makes me love him harder, experience his too-big feelings more. I especially like his unbelievability because he’s surrounded by lovely mundanity: flawed but loving parents, countless beautiful and unremarkable people of New York.
I love, love, love his quest through the city to meet everyone he can with the last name Black. I like the impossibility of it, the various things that come together to make it “possible” when even those various things seem deeply unrealistic.
I like the sometimes-eye-rolly ways that the author plays with formatting and perspective and language. It doesn’t take me out. It wraps me up more.
Bottom line: I like all the things that make this book beautiful and completely one of a kind. Even the over-the-top things. 8426415164 A 9-11 novel, narrated by a precocious 9 year old who lost his father. I feel strongly that folks who are currently adoring Fredrik Backman or Matt Haig's work would also enjoy this one. It has the same way of using a variety of devices to look right at unpleasant things while not being unpleasant to read. It also has an amiable and optimistic view of humanity. Foer introduces us to a massive cast of characters, who are all generally doing their best.
The nattering first person style means that pages turn quickly and easily, and the specificity of the setting means you really feel you've been taken somewhere real.
For me, however, it was ultimately too sweet. I needed it to either be 150 fewer pages, so that the thought exercise could really shine, or I needed it to be a little less gentle in its handling of the reader. JOSTLE ME. JOSTLE ME!
Also note: I tackled this book as part of my 2023 reading challenge to read books from this crowd-sourced list of recommended standalone novels published between 1985-2007: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
I am a brittle and crotchety reader, so please don't take my opinions on these novels as universal. 8426415164
A more apt title would have been Terribly Artificial and Unbearably Pretentious. This seems like the kind of thing I would have thought was a profound idea when I myself was nine, laboring on crayon illustrations to include with my manuscript into the wee hours of the morning. Maybe that means Foer succeeded. I happen to think it means his efforts were an abject failure, and that he has a great many readers and critics completely snowed.
With a book like this, you either accept it as charming wistfulness, or you don’t. You either think random tabbing on pages is innovative, or you don’t. You think empty pages and single phrases on other pages is a daring deconstruction of traditional publishing mores, or you don’t. I don’t.
Foer’s grieving young narrator is a ridiculous creation, the book’s pagination is something a stricter editor should have vomited upon, and the situations in which Oskar finds himself are fabricated of glitter-encrusted papier-mâché. This story is never once believable; therefore any emotion generated is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Now don’t misunderstand; I read lots of far-fetched books, so I believe genuine emotion can be achieved through stories about the tooth fairy, WMDs, sympathetic lawyers or any number of myths. But too many times in this book, people do things just to do them, and things happen just to have them happen or to give Foer scanty reason to wax poetic for pages at a time – without such bourgeoisie restrictions as paragraphs or punctuation (or sensible storytelling) muddling up the artiste’s vision.
Foer’s stream-of-consciousness narrative reminds me of the saying about the infinite monkeys: sooner or later one of an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters is going to randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare. Except in Foer’s case, it’s as though he was one of the monkeys in the middle of infinity, a bright but underachieving chimpanzee picking nits and banging the keys petulantly with a hardened piece of fecal matter. If Foer wished to write a thick book entirely in free verse (broken up with pictures now and again so people don’t become “bored”), then he should have had the cajones to do so, not foist this vanity project upon the public under the guise of a novel claiming to be about reaction to 9/11.
This is a book for a self-important Attention-Deficit society. I think most people in today’s age of texting while driving and non-stop news alerts and picture-in-picture don’t actually read every word on the page anyway. They scan pages looking for the “good stuff,” and that’s all they remember. So therefore they’re not put off by the author’s interminable ramblings, his attempt to bludgeon the reader with a thick blanket of nonsensical phrases, hoping they will be distracted into thinking they come together to create some sort of profound stew greater than the sum of its silly parts. But for those of us who think each word matters, this practice is annoying subterfuge, and ultimately meaningless. 8426415164 Oh, wow. 8426415164 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father, a year after he is killed in the September 11 attacks. The discovery inspires Oskar to search all around New York for information about the key and closure following his father's death.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز یازدهم ماه ژانویه سال2019میلادی
عنوان: بینهایت بلند و به غایت نزدیک؛ نویسنده: جاناتان سافران فوئر؛ مترجم: لیلا نصیریها؛ ویراستار احسان نوروزی؛ تهران نشر چشمه، سال1397؛ در415ص؛ شابک9786002298553؛ چاپ دوم سال1397؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده21م
داستان «بینهایت بلند و به غایت نزدیک» درباره ی پسربچه ی نه ساله ای به نام «اسکار شل» است، که پدرش را در حملات «یازدهم سپتامبر» از دست میدهد؛ رمان درباره ی جستجوهای این پسربچه، برای پیدا کردن قفلی است، که پدر کلید اسرارآمیزش را، برایش به جا گذاشته است؛ نویسنده برای نگارش رمان، از تکنیکهای «پست مدرن» از جمله «راویهای گوناگون»، و «تایپوگرافی»، استفاده کرده است؛ پس از انتشار رمان، فیلمی سینمایی با برداشت از رمان ساخته شد، که کارگردان و بازیگرش به ترتیب، «استیون دالدری» و «تام هنکس» بودند
چند سال پس از درگذشت پدرش، در یورش «یازدهم سپتامبر»، «اسکار شِل» کلیدی را در گلدانی پیدا میکند؛ کلید به پدرش تعلق دارد، «اسکار» از این بابت مطمئن است؛ اما این کلید کدام یک از یکصدوشصت و دو میلیون قفل شهر نیویورک را باز میکند؟ این پرسش، «اسکارِ» کاشف، نامه نگار، و کارآگاه آماتور را، بر آن وامیدارد، تا هر پنج محله ی نیویورک را، زیر پا بگذارد، و وارد زندگی دوستان، اقوام و آدمهایی کاملاً غریبه شود؛ در این راه، غم و غصه های بسیاری، روی شانه های «اسکار» سنگینی میکند، زیر تأثیر این غم و غصه ها، حتی جراحتهایی به خودش وارد میکند، و با هر کشفی، یک گام به دل ماجرای پُر رمز و رازی نزدیک میشود، که به پنجاه سال پیش، و تاریخچه ی خانوادگیشان بازمیگردد؛ اما آیا این سفر او را از پدر درگذشته اش دورتر، یا او را به پدرش نزدیکتر میکند؟
نقل نمونه متن: (پس صندلی چرخدار را آوردم دم پله ها، و با هم داد زدند که یک جورهایی عجیب بود، چون صداهاشان میآمد بالا و میرفت پایین، اما صورت همدیگر را نمیتوانستند ببینند؛ با هم زدند زیر خنده و صدای خنده شان کل راه پله را پر کرد؛ بعد آقای «بلک» داد زد، «اسکار»! و من داد زدم، این که اسم من است، چرا داد میزنی؛ و او داد زد، بیا پایین! وقتی برگشتم لابی، آقای «بلک» توضیح داد شخصی که دنبالش بودیم پیشخدمت «ویندوز آن د ورلد» بوده؛ یعنی که چه؟ «فلیز»، زنی که باهاش حرف زده بودم، خودش شخصا او را نمیشناخت؛ وقتی اثاث کشی کرده بود اینجا، در موردش شنیده بود؛ - واقعا؟ - از خودم که در نیاوردم؛ رفتیم توی خیابان و شروع کردیم به راه رفتن؛ ماشینی گذشت که صدای آهنگش واقعا بلند بود، و قلبم را به لرزه درآورد؛ بالا را نگاه کردم، و بند رختهایی را دیدم، که پنجره های زیادی را با لباسهایی که رویشان آویزان بود، بههم وصل کرده بودند؛ از آقای «بلک» پرسیدم «وقتی آدمها میگویند بند رخت، منظورشان این است»؛ - گفت «منظورشان همین است» - گفتم: «من هم همین فکر را میکردم»؛ - باز هم کمی پیاده رفتیم؛ بچه ها توی خیابانها داشتند سنگها را با پا پرت میکردند، و خوشحال میخندیدند؛ آقای «بلک» یکی از سنگها را برداشت، و توی جیبش گذاشت؛ به تابلوِ خیابان نگاه کرد، و بعد به ساعتش؛ چندتایی پیرمرد جلوِ مغازه ای روی صندلی نشسته بودند؛ سیگار میکشیدند، و دنیا را مثل تلویزیون تماشا میکردند، - گفتم: «به نظرم خیلی عجیب است وقتی بهاش فکر میکنم» - چی؟ - که «اگنس» آنجا کار میکرد؛ شاید بابام را میشناخت؛ یا نمیشناخت، اما شاید آن روز صبح «اگنس» سفارش قهوه اش را گرفته بوده؛ بابا آنجا بود، توی رستوران؛ جلسه داشت؛ شاید «اگنس» قهوه بابا را دوباره پُر کرده بود یا همچین چیزی؛ - ممکن است؛ - شاید با هم مرده اند؛ میدانستم که نمیداند چی در این مورد بگوید، چون معلوم است که با هم مرده بودند؛ سئوال واقعی این بود که چه طوری با هم مرده بودند، مثلا هر کدامشان یک طرف رستوران بوده اند، یا کنار هم یا یکجور دیگر؛ شاید با هم رفته بودند پشت بام؛ توی بعضی از عکسها که میشد دید مردم با هم پریده اند و دست هم را نگه داشته اند؛ پس شاید این کار را کرده باشند؛ یا شاید تا موقعی که ساختمان پایین ریخته با هم حرف زده بودند؛ درباره چی با هم حرف زدند؟ دوتاشان زمین تا آسمان با هم فرق داشتند؛ شاید درباره من باهاش حرف زده بوده؛ فکر کردم به اش چی گفته؛ نمیتوانستم بگویم اینکه بابا دست یکی دیگر را نگه داشته بود، باعث میشد چه فکری درباره اش بکنم.»؛ پایان نقل
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 22/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 09/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی 8426415164
CHARACTERS Tan fuerte, tan cerca
Tras perder a su padre en el atentado terrorista contra las Torres Gemelas del 11 de septiembre de 2001, Oskar Schell, un niño de nueve años de poderosa inventiva, encuentra en la habitación de su progenitor una misteriosa llave dentro de un sobre donde está escrita la palabra black. Tras averiguar que bien podría ser un apellido, Oskar se embarca en una aventura (que tiene lugar exclusivamente los sábados, para lo cual debe sacrificar su clase de francés) por toda la ciudad de Nueva York buscando al supuesto Mr./Mrs. Black que le pueda echar un cable a la hora de resolver el misterio de la extraña llave. En este esperpéntico trayecto repleto de peripecias, Oskar podrá averiguar muchas cosas sobre sí mismo, su padre y, sobre todo, la historia de sus abuelos, sobrevivientes de la masacre acontecida en Dresden en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Tan fuerte, tan cerca
There must be something wrong with me. I’m not as smart as my goodreader friends. I lack empathy. My humor is deficient. I have no compassion. And I suck at life.
Of the 40 of you “friends” who read this, this is how you rated it:
5-stars: 18 people
4-stars: 13 people
3-stars: 7 people
2-stars: 2 people
1-star: 0 people
Something wrong with me indeed.
(Or something wrong with all of you.)
No. I didn’t finish it. I value opportunity and freedom too much for that. I listened to it. People tell me if I had read it instead of listening to it I would have liked it more. I now tell them that I don’t care.
I have returned this grouping of compact discs to my local library. They are now safely out of my hands. Its twelve separate discs no longer have to worry about me yelling obscenities at them extremely loudly. They need not be concerned that they get thrown again at the passenger side door, incredibly closely.
So go away Jonathan Safran Foer. Don’t cry for me Argentina. It’s your birthday, don’t cry if you want to. Stop your sobbing. I was crying just to get you, now I'm dying cause I let you -- do what you do down on me. Or not. Okay, please don’t. Seriously, I’ve had enough. You are cheesy and you annoy me. I’m done. So take your forced cuteness and your vegan cupcakes and go home. 8426415164 When Thomas Pynchon invented what James Wood later named “hyper realism”, he did literature no favors. To read Pynchon is to witness genius at its most joyless. A mind capable of inventing myriad things and compelled to record them all. But at least Pynchon showed genius.
What Jonathan Safran Foer shows, however, is mere gimmickry. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close takes readers who thought they might have seen a glimmer of greatness in Everything is Illuminated and convinces them all they really saw were special effects.
It’s very difficult to read Foer’s second novel without reflecting on his first. Everything is Illuminated began in such an original way that a reader forgave the 150 or so dull pages of less-than-compelling writing that came along throughout the rest of the book. The reader forgave the puerile reflections on the Holocaust and the manufactured confession of homosexuality. Because the book began so originally.
But Foer is a one-trick pony. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he’s once more co-opted a mass tragedy and made a fruit salad of it with various voices and narrative tricks. Oh sure, the book has an underlying tone of sadness – sadness, not seriousness – because, clever as he wants to be, Foer didn’t dare go wholehog with a tragedy still as fresh as 9/11. But that’s about the only restriction he put on his vanity.
To indulge himself with a hundred irritating digressions and quips, Foer invented a child narrator. This has become more and more common among the hyper-realism set in the last 10 years. Raised by guidance counselors who told them to never stop being childish, these novelists give us hundreds of pages of “exploring their inner child” – all under the guise of serious artistic endeavor.
But this is not serious art. This is an author who makes the easy choice every time. When he thinks he has something profound to say, he doesn’t hesitate to have his nine-year-old narrator couch things in college-level language. The rest of the time, when he feels like writing about whichever page of the encyclopedia he happened to turn to that morning, he has the little professor wander off wherever he wishes, always with a literary safety net that says, “I’m trying to depict the world through a child’s eyes!”
But we should ask ourselves why a novelist feels compelled to depict a mass tragedy through a child’s eyes. After all, this isn’t biography; Foer could have depicted the tragedy through anyone’s eyes at all. Better put, when he sat down to write about the savagery of Napoleon’s 1812 battle with Russia, why didn’t Leo Tolstoy depict the burning of Moscow through the eyes of a nine-year-old and his nutty and mute grandfather? Probably because a nine-year-old would have limited Tolstoy’s vocabulary too drastically; a nine-year-old doesn’t know enough to say anything original about war.
Tolstoy, in other words, was too concerned about making an original commentary to worry about being a “fresh new voice!” in the contemporary fiction scene. Tolstoy took a large subject and made it larger. Foer takes a large subject and makes it tiny.
But sometimes, I’ve learned, large things must be tiny. That’s how Foer’s narrator would say it. And he’d be wrong, of course. But then, that’s why we don’t publish books written by nine-year-olds. 8426415164 There are books that affect me and then there are books that kill me. This falls in the latter. I cried on the couch, I cried on the bus, I cried at stoplights, I cried at work.. I cried more over this book than I did on the actual September 11th. Then I became upset that this piece of fiction could invoke such melancholia. Can I use the excuse of being in shock during the actual event? That it seemed like a movie?
I have no excuse.
Flash back: The second half of 1994, my then boyfriend and I living in the East Village, 23 years old and clueless. We were broke most of the time, not much into clubbing, so about 4 out of 7 nights we would walk. Never north.. only through the Village or SoHo and eventually our meandering would lead us to the Towers. No matter what path we’d take, it was our destination. I remember many nights sitting on this ratty red paint peeled bench staring across the river at Jersey, specifically the Colgate sign, and just talking about everything. Hours sped by and we’d drag our sorry asses back to the train and to our tiny apartment. I remember nights where I’d hug the side of Tower One, pressing against it and lift my head as far back as I could and stare up until the glass met the sky and I’d get so dizzy I’d stumble back. I remember the night that we decided to marry, I remember exchanging our vows leaning against the railing staring up, always up.
I haven’t been to New York in 13 years, I can’t even imagine a New York without those buildings.
Anyway…
There are 43 ‘Incrediblys’ and 63 ‘Extremelys’ within this book. Does anyone really ever use those adverbs anymore? Is anything ever extreme or incredible enough for us? My daughter has taken to using ‘perfectly’ in almost every sentence and it brings a smile to my face each time.
The journey that the boy, Oskar, takes in this book is beautiful. The need to feel close to his father who died in the attacks, to spend just a bit more time with him. While Oskar is a bit unbelievable as a character, I felt that that was soon overshadowed by the images presented. I know I do this a lot in reviews, but I can’t help it: Lines like “Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.” or “ My insides don’t match up with my outsides.” and “It takes a life to learn how to live.”
I’m a sucker for a good line.
When Oskar is anxious he describes it as ‘wearing heavy boots’ and when his Grandmother likes something or in a good mood she uses the term ‘that was One Hundred Dollars’ and then there’s a whole mention of a ‘Birdseed shirt’ that I’m still unclear about but enjoy the imagery of.
But, this isn’t just Oskar’s journey.. this is also about Oskar’s grandparents and that piece is as strong as his story, sometimes stronger. I won’t go into that anymore, I’ll let you read about it.
Some have called this ‘gimmicky’ or ‘precious’ but I was truly moved by this story and combined with the images presented, it will stay with me for a very long time to come. As will 1994.
8426415164 xxxxxxx 8426415164 I’m Oskar with a k like Liza with a Z cause Oskar with a k is krazy (also kind, klever and kultured). I’m 10 going on Dalai Lama. I make jewellery (I know!) and collect butterflies who have died naturally and play a tambourine constantly. You have to wonder why no one has killed me since I must drive people insane with my maximum cuteness. Oh, and have shortwave radio conversations with my grandma over in another desirable residence in the Upper West Side. I have empathy for every living thing including you. This great and terrible tragedy happened to me so nobody, not even those horrid GR people, can make fun of me, even when I’m so twee a hobbit would thwow up all over the nearest elf. This is the way I speak with my Mom :
“Mom?” “Yes?” “Nothing.”
“What is it, baby?” “Well it’s just that wouldn’t it be great if mattresses had spaces for your arm, so that when you rolled on to your side, you could fit just right?” “That would be nice.” “And good for your back, probably, because it would let your spine be straight, which I know is important.” “That is important.” “Also, it would make snuggling easier… And making snuggling easier is important.” “Very.”
Here, you can use this bin, or the sink, whichever. I’m so kloying and keen to make everyone’s lives better by befriending deaf centenarians and lonely billionaires and dragging them off on eccentric heart-twanging dead-father-related quests that Amelie from that kooky French movie Amelie would be out-cloyed and out-eccentriced at every turn & would have to throw herself out of my window wearing a birdseed dress which is an invention of mine for suicides by defenestration as the birdseed would attract birds who would carry the person aloft & thus prevent their self-destruction. Okay maybe when the birdseed was gone then the person would plummet, but I don’t think that far about any of my kooky schemes, magical children who could never possibly exist don’t do that.
My brain is just naturally like Pixar HD.
I’ll invent an invisibility suit that has a camera on my back that takes video of everything behind me and plays it onto a plasma screen that I’ll wear on my front, which will cover everything but my face. It’ll look like I’m not there at all.
You may be wondering how I got to be like I am. Well, there’s a long line of cutesypie narrators in my family. My grandfather, frinstance. He’s tweer than me. Is that a word? It is now. He explained How I Met Your Grandmother like this:
I had so much to ask her, “Do you lie on your stomach and look for things under the ice? Do you like plays? Do you like it when you can hear something before you can see it?... in the middle of my youth, in the middle of Europe, in between our two villages, on the verge of losing everything, I bumped into something and was knocked to the ground… at first I thought I’d walked into a tree, but then the tree became a person…
I would like to explain that I am depressed about my father but as I’m in this novel I don’t call it that, I say I’m wearing heavy boots. I would also like to say that what with all this smiling through tears, the grandma, the grandfather, the old guy who can hear again, the mom who is probably schmoozing with some guy in the next room, the sad quest to find the Blacks of New York, AND 9/11 AND let's throw Hitler into the mix, you don’t have to look any further for a dictionary definition of emotional blackmail.
8426415164
