Product Description

Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination.
Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1065 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-04
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Oskar Schell is not your average nine-year-old. A budding inventor, he spends his time imagining wonderful creations. He also collects random photographs for his scrapbook and sends letters to scientists. When his father dies in the World Trade Center collapse, Oskar shifts his boundless energy to a quest for answers. He finds a key hidden in his father's things that doesn't fit any lock in their New York City apartment; its container is labeled "Black." Using flawless kid logic, Oskar sets out to speak to everyone in New York City with the last name of Black. A retired journalist who keeps a card catalog with entries for everyone he's ever met is just one of the colorful characters the boy meets. As in Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton, 2002), Foer takes a dark subject and works in offbeat humor with puns and wordplay. But Extremely Loud pushes further with the inclusion of photographs, illustrations, and mild experiments in typography reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (Dell, 1973). The humor works as a deceptive, glitzy cover for a fairly serious tale about loss and recovery. For balance, Foer includes the subplot of Oskar's grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden. Although this story is not quite as evocative as Oskar's, it does carry forward and connect firmly to the rest of the novel. The two stories finally intersect in a powerful conclusion that will make even the most jaded hearts fall.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
After his spellbinding first novel Everything is Illuminated (***1/2 Summer 2002), Jonathan Safran Foer seems "trapped in [Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close] by the very tics that made his first one a success" (Chicago Sun Times). The plot structure—quirky boy embarking on a quest for information about a loved one—mirrors that of his debut. And while Foer still displays a "seemingly inexhaustible supply of verbal ingenuity," this time around there is an uneasy balance between the prose and the subject matter (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). This is, after all, a book about tragedy and loss. Some see Oskar’s oddball evasion of his emotions as affecting and heartbreaking; others see it as evasive and, what’s worse, manipulative. Maybe the wounds of 9/11 are still too fresh.

Technical issues are more cut and dried. Oskar’s voice, for all of its precocity, overall fails to draw the reader in. Instead of portraying the world through Oskar’s eyes, Foer spins the reader around in the boy’s head, a claustrophobic world of lists and fears. The inclusion of photos makes the dearth of visual writing that much more glaring. This flatness extends to other characters as well. This can be forgiven in a book with such a large cast (there are 262 Blacks in the New York City phone book). But many grumble that the caricatures include two main characters, the Schell grandparents.

It is easy to aim critics’ complaints about Oskar’s precocity at Foer himself; all recognize this young author’s great talent. Many admire Foer’s reach for something grand, even as they acknowledge that he hasn’t fully accomplished his task in this novel.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Good book for a book club discussion
The book lead to an interesting discussion as some liked the book and some didn't While at times difficult to follow overall I felt what I call the wow factor. It really showed how 9-11 or just the lost of a parent in a tramatic way can effect a young boy

Incredible
Having finished this book, imbued with a newfound appreciation for the mystery and fragility of life, I quit my job and moved across the country. I finished the book sitting on a toilet in a Motel Six on Easter, and thought, I need to change my life.

A note about the bells and whistles, the pictures and pages of numbers and cryptic messages:

I've read a number of negative reviews of this book that basically lambasted Foer's use of these devices. I'd be curious to see how opinion delineates according to age. My guess is that people born after 1975 love the gimmicks and people born earlier would hate them.

I loved them. I loved pouring over the pictures and the pages of cryptic notes and marveling at their different shades of meaning, and how they related to the book as a whole. It was also just fun.

Beautiful
For such a sad topic, a beautiful and hopeful story. As a father, the story warmed my heart. The writing was strong and engaging. I was sometimes annoyed with some of the 'tricks' in the book..pictures inserted, but grew to like and appreciate them. Great read...don't miss it.