Word: foer
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Everything Is Illuminated. The Manchurian Candidate star Liev Schreiber is running the whole campaign for this summer's big-screen adaptation, starring Elijah Wood, of the Ukraine-set Jonathan Safran Foer novel...
...subjects for fiction go, 9/11 is pretty much in the maximum-degree-of-difficulty category. "I was very hesitant," Foer remembers. "I felt like I wasn't sure how much it was my story to tell." But he thought somebody needed to write about the attacks in a way that was depoliticized, stripped of ideology, of everything but pure tragedy. "So much of the reason I wrote the book was because I was tired of the tellings of [the Twin Tower bombings] having messages, having points. What I wanted was exactly to make something that didn't have a point...
...tempting at times to resist Foer's writing. There is a certain quirky cuteness to Oskar that can be cloying. When he trots out yet another amusing hobby or one of his many idiosyncratic verbal mannerisms--he pronounces acronyms like ESP phonetically; instead of saying something is great, he says it's "one hundred dollars"--you have to fight back the image of Jonathan Lipnicki, the kid from Jerry Maguire. But these doubts are pulverized by the book's devastating set pieces, which are of the kind only a genuine talent who knows exactly what he wants...
...those moments, Foer just might be as good as he's trying so hard to be. "That was the part where I felt the least self-consciousness," he says. "While I was writing it, I really felt like I had all these incredibly deep feelings and I was pushing them out the end of my pencil. This is what I want my writing to feel like...
...hugely ambitious writer, who at 28 already has two better-than-solid novels out and who is only getting better, you have to wonder what happened to the glittery, bow-tie-wearing little boy he used to be. "When I was younger, I wore it all on my sleeve," Foer says. "I think writing helped me change that because it was another way of showing myself." So, is mini-Liberace gone forever? Just for a micro-second, so that you almost miss it, the sober demeanor is gone, and Foer lets himself look a little bit mischievous...