[ book tip by Anne-Marie Savage ] Wide-eyed, open-mouthed. A little lost, a little found. This is the result of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for both the main character and the reader. This book moves between past and present, humour and sorrow in a way which would feel disjointed if written by anyone else. Foer knows how to deliver... and he delivers in such a fresh, creative way; from pages of numbers representing words to pages of words written over words, becoming indecipherable, with their sense of time running out. This book is so original in content and delivery that it is like nothing before.  It is fiction that feels so painfully like fact. It is multi-layered with issues, most centrally the death of the nine-year-old main character’s father in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre. I cried, laughed, slammed the book shut when it all got too much, but immediately started tentatively peeling back the pages to continue. I marvelled at how a book could feel so unlike a book yet still satisfy.

Foer leads you through a story of mystery and discovery in a way that makes you feel part of the book and the book a part of you. I am not nine years old. I have not found a key in a vase in a closet that every part of me says belonged to the father I have lost. I am not set on finding the lock in which it fits. But when reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I was all of these things. On reaching the end I had almost forgotten who I actually was. This is the thing about Jonathan Safran Foer. He draws you into the book so successfully that you are almost incapable of enjoying any other book.

[ Favourite quote ] 'She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.'

[ book info ] Foer, Jonathan Safran: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. (Book language: English) Safran. Penguin, 2006 . ISBN: 978-0-14-101269-8.