Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

After having avoided this book for a long time - I think I was put off by the little I read of Everything Is Illuminated - I've finally picked up and finished Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Written by Jonathan Safran Foer, and in the process of being made into a film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock (that can only be good, right...?), it's been a big success after coming out in 2005. We follow 9 year old Oskar Schell, and his search for things to do with his father, who was one of the many dead after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001.

It's been hailed as a sad but funny book, and seems to have a big following, especially in America. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close does a good job of relating a devastating tale of loss, longing and loneliness, while still managing to be funny and thought-provoking beyond the grief. It is full of clever devices, both the ones that Oskar invents in his head, and the ones Safran Foer has employed to tell the story in various acrobatic style decisions, including typefaces, imagery, interjected content and illustrations, and the excellent book cover.

On the other hand, it plays on all the loudest strings, and gets somewhat tedious or cliched after a while. Not only are we dealing with a fatherless child after 9/11, a love lost in the Dresden bombs during World War II, a pregnant wife left by her husband, several very lonely old people, a man who can't speak out of grief, and a mother and widow in need of a shoulder to cry on; we also get a heavily melancholic and forcedly uplifted first-person story of the bullying and loneliness of a child too intelligent for his years. It tends to get a bit much, and even if all the pieces are quite intriguing, they almost cancel each other out, and it starts to get harder to get emotionally involved with any one of them.

The stylistic experiments also start to seem rather put on, and while they keep an appearance of being related to the story, I suspect that a lot of them were employed out of an interest in 'what can be done' rather than 'what will help the book'. Towards the end, I was more interested in finishing the book than following the story to the end, but I still think it was a worthwhile read, and it will be interesting to see if the film will manage to capture some of the quirkiness from the book - or if it'll be a less than impressive Hanks/Bullock rom-com with a layer of kooky melancholia.