11 Oskar arrives home to a series of messages on the answering machine left by his father, who is trapped in one of the towers. Oskar idolized is father, who told him stories and patiently answered his questions. Oskar, who narrates much of the book, is an only child, the son of jewelry-store owner Thomas Schell. His range of knowledge extends to bidets but not to Winston Churchill. He can perform The Flight of the Bumblebee on the tambourine, peppers Stephen Hawking with letters, and has the (nonspeaking) part of Yorick in the school production of Hamlet. Oskar's business card lists some of his interests: 'Inventor, Jewelry Designer, Jewelry Fabricator, Amateur Entomologist, Francophile, Vegan, Origamist, Pacifist, Percussionist, Amateur Astronomer, Computer Consultant, Amateur Archeologist, Collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, and semiprecious stones.' Precocious doesn't begin to describe Oskar, Foer's most brilliant creation. Credit the irrepressible Oskar Schell, the boy who has lost his father.

Laughs are few, but there are plenty of smiles along the way.

But reading it is by no means depressing. This is, after all, a book about sorrow, guilt and loss. The early parts of the book are laugh-out-loud funny, but it darkens considerably as it journeys into the Holocaust.ĮL&IC is even more linguistically inventive than its predecessor, but in a different tonal key. Foer's Virgil is an exuberant Ukrainian travel guide who overrelies on his English thesaurus, with hilarious results. It centers on a young American who happens to be named Jonathan Safron Foer and who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his Jewish grandfather from the Nazis. Published in 2002, it made the best-seller lists, won a bunch of awards, and was named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Foer began writing his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, while still a student at Princeton.

27 issue of the New York Times magazine). It's the eagerly awaited second novel from the 28-year-old Foer, currently the hottest young literary lion around (he was the cover story of the Feb. It's really a lovely book, humane and quirky and for the most part hard to put down. The last are printed in reverse order so the man appears to be rising rather than falling.Įxtremely Loud & Incredibly Close could easily have been a cloying, incoherent mess, but it isn't. He's experimented with visuals - photographs of doorknobs and African masks, a series of artist's renderings of a man falling down the side of a Trade Center tower. He's invested it with only the most tenuous of plots and larded it with Beckett-like monologues and dialogues that bounce between the present and World War II Dresden.

Incredibly close book