And incredibly sad. This book actually made me cry, which doesn't happen very often. I started it late in the evening and stayed up until I finished it, and then I re-read it again the next day. It's beautifully written and funny and the first book I've read that includes the aftermath of September 11 in a genuine way. Foer also interweaves narratives of the bombing of Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden, which I think connects the suffering of 9/11 to the suffering of others and starts the long process of historical context.
From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com)
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.
This book definitely goes on Amy's Top Ten Books of 2005 List, currently at #1.
Loved it, cried too. His first book was really difficult to plow through but his brilliance was obviously there. I'm not sure I'd recommend the first one. I would recommend reading Nicolaus Kraus, his wife's book, The History of Love. Interesting how they both intertwine their stories.
Posted by: joanne | Monday, July 25, 2005 at 07:32 AM
His first book - Everything is Illuminated - is in my top 3 ever, beaten only by Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the best of the new breed, and maybe the Corrections by Johnathan Franzen, but actually I would put it ahead of The Corrections, so its number 2. Zadie Smith is also great.
Im about to buy Foer's new one you review and his wife's new book is also supposedly amazing, what a couple.
Posted by: Ben Barren | Saturday, July 09, 2005 at 05:27 AM