Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I finished reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer over a month ago, but I’ve been having trouble talking about it. Not because it was traumatizing or anything, but it affected me in this weird way that I can’t explain.

Half of the book is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy named Oskar who lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. One day, he finds a key in a vase that belonged to his father, and he goes out on a quest to find what lock the key unlocks, meeting a lot of people along the way. The other half of the book is epistolary, made up of letters written by Oskar’s grandparents.

Oskar is impossibly precocious, but somehow it didn’t become annoying to me. The letters describe so much tragedy and heartbreak, and it’s sort of an unconventional epic love story. The typography’s interesting in this book, like when the text of one of the letters becomes more and more compressed, as the writer was running out of space.

The book moved along at a good pace, and more and more details about Oskar’s grandparents’ relationship are revealed, as Oskar gets closer to finding out the secret behind the key. And then we reach the end of the book, where Oskar has a cathartic, gut-wrenching moment, with a complete stranger. I think this was when I really felt affected by this story. This little boy of nine years poured his heart and soul into this journey, and at the end of it he was able to let go of the guilt he had held onto for years. With a complete stranger. There was something so powerful about that moment. Something I never experienced in my life.

Yeah, it’s fiction, and the plot is supposed to be emotionally manipulative. So I guess it was successful in that way. The narrator’s crazy inner thoughts, his wisdom beyond his years, the grandparents’ rollercoaster ride of a relationship together, it all just worked together for me, somehow. I might have been in need of something a little different and a little weird at the time, and this book filled that need.

I watched the movie a few weeks later, the day before Valentine’s Day. The main character came off as being more autistic and less well-adjusted than in the book. Maybe speaking the words out loud has a way of bringing out awkwardness that written words on a page can’t convey. The grandparents’ story is far less developed in the movie, probably because it would’ve made the movie incredibly long. But the same climactic moment is there at the end, and I actually preferred the ending of the movie, which adds a little extra closure on the end that I didn’t get from the book.