Word: foerã
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Some have questioned his decision to take on something so weighty, deriding his ambition and branding the attempt contrived, but in Foer??s view, it would have been contrived not to write about 9/11 given how much of his thoughts it was taking up. Honesty is always best, Foer said in an interview last Thursday from his hotel room in Boston’s Four Seasons, and novelists are not doing anyone any favors by pretending that they weren’t affected by the attacks...
Getting over that will be Foer??s greatest obstacle when he sits down to write his third book. “Extremely Loud,” for all its richness and readability, exposes his apparent fear of writing about himself, and suggests a fatal flaw that will hold him back if he doesn’t get over it soon. While his rhetoric has gotten less stilted and his storytelling has become more fluid since “Everything Is Illuminated,” his continued reluctance to just be himself, instead of impersonating a grandmother, a young...
...just about everything in his two books besides show what it’s like to be him. “Everything Is Illuminated,” for instance, takes the form of a correspondence between two writers—one is a Ukrainian translator, and the other is Foer??s namesake, who communicates only through historical tracts of magical realism about the Jewish village of Trachimbrod. Never do we get an “I” in Foer??s books, and when we do, it’s always in reference to someone else...
...require photographic illustrations, whole pages of blank space, disorienting experiments with typesetting, and a flipbook of a man falling from the burning World Trade Center. Although it’s an admittedly clichéd term, “Extremely Loud” is a multimedia experience, although to Foer??s credit, it’s not an offensively kitschy...
Beneath the frills, Foer says, lies an almost archetypal tale—one that draws less from postmodern literary theory and more from the traditional fable. Although the narrative foreground is colored and clouded over by Foer??s insistence on side-stories and his obsession with the past, it really is a pretty simple tale. Oskar searches the five boroughs of New York City for information about a mysterious key he has discovered in his father’s closet. Along the way, he makes some new friends, learns some lessons, and follows secret clues. Foer tells...