"Then it is dark; a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." - John Cheever

Friday, February 17, 2006

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close



Just finished the latest novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's ambitious, brilliant in parts but only partly successful. It is similar in style and structure to his other book "Everything is Illuminated", in that it is half based around an eccentric, very funny narrator and half around his forebear's various recollections and adventures through global traumas - specifically the bombing of Dresden and 9-11. Anyway, worth a read.

4 comments:

John said...

I find the idea of novels covering 9/11 and subsequent events a bit odd somehow, the form not appropriate to their nature. Maybe because until recently historical upheavals covered novelistically were (for our generation) safely consigned to the past - WWI and II etc?

Tom said...

Yes, I know what you mean. It was odd how much more sensitive I was to the 9-11 stuff than to the (much more graphic) descriptions of the bombing of Dresden.

John said...

I guess we live in an immediate visual culture now and this has been technologically driven. There's a quasi-Marxist argument in there somewhere.

Col said...

Yes, there was something about watching it happen in real time, and the situation escalating so horrendously in front of our eyes, that was particularly traumatic.