Word: foer
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...doesn’t appear to have entirely avoided the trend either, with debuts by everyone from James Frey to Yale Daily News sex columnist Natalie Kirinsky garnering attention at every echelon of cultural criticism. But the biggest winner in the scramble for fresh blood has been Jonathan Safran Foer, who was reportedly only 20 when he wrote his first New York Times bestseller, “Everything is Illuminated...
Oskar’s goal becomes discovering what the key will unlock, but that goal is irretrievably linked to his experience of the events of Sept. 11. Through Oskar’s search, spurred on by terrorism and fueled by his own character, Foer posits a post-Sept. 11 mentality, formed by the tragedy, but foraging forward in history...
...Foer situates the story in a broader history by including chapters narrated by each of Oskar’s paternal grandparents, survivors of the 1945 Dresden bombings. This creates a tension in the novel between a treatment of the terrorism as cataclysmic and unprecedented and an alignment of it with American and world history...
...other hand, Foer makes a welcome effort to contextualize Sept. 11, and what saves Extremely Loud from being a kind of ode to its earth-shattering enormity is his presentation of other tragedies as predecessors. In addition to stories about the American destruction of Dresden, there is a transcript of an interview with a Hiroshima survivor, which Oskar plays for a school project, also reporting on the scientific dimensions of the atom bomb...
...Foer can mix the trials of growing up with the poignancy of grief because his novel is not a memorial to Sept. 11 in the same way that much of the artwork and writing on it up to now has been. Extremely Loud is not a supplement to the famous photograph of a firefighter who holds a flag amidst the rubble. It is a digested, reflective, and tender reworking of what happened into an active, contemporary context...