Extremely, Incredibly

No work for the past 2 months is making me antsy. Although I know the grass always looks greener from the other side (it's also easy to complain when you are in the full swing of work and don't have time for anything), but there's only so many times I can "wander" around the city and look at pretty things. I'm starting to bore myself, and that is unusual.

I have, however, managed to read a few books since I've been up here, and one in particular has made a lasting impression: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The story, basically and without giving a thing away, is about a 9 year old boy whose father died in the WTC on 9/11. All he has left is the 5 messages his father left on their home answering machine as he was stuck in the tower. That, and a mysterious envelope with an even more mysterious and random key. The boy spends the novel trying to figure out the origins of the key, in the hopes it will bring some sort of closure to his grief. The story is far more interesting and nuanced than I've described, but take my word for it that it's remarkable.

It's really about the contours of grief and mourning, which don't (I think) ever have closure, and this is what our little protagonist learns at a tender age. Foer uses intergenerational trauma and grief, using his grandfather/mother's involvement in the bombing of Dresden and a first hand account of the bombing of Hiroshima, as a way to explore this. This, however, is less interesting than the little boy's perspective, which teaches us (or, reminds us) that grief is both singular and universal, both significant and completely irrelevant in a broader scope, and how complicated grief can be when it is shared and yet totally individual. It would be easy to say that Foer is stating that the boy's "loss of innocence" (realizing he that you cannot foreclose grief) is the biggest tragedy, but the novel is smarter than that.

Up next is Antonya Nelson's Female Trouble.