So I've found myself with the unfamiliar freedom of no obligations. One of the items on the to-do list that I compulsively assembled (if having nothing to do has taught me anything, it's that I need to be doing something) is: Read contemporary authors. The greatest gap in my literary knowledge has to do with authors who are still alive. So I found a few names that I should probably be able to attach more than just "author" to, and began. It was strikingly easy to finish the first in an afternoon. I had forgotten what that felt like. I wasn't prepared for such instant gratification. I decided I should write up at least a paragraph to force myself to think a bit.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Adorable little boy tries to comprehend his father’s September 11 death in the midst of adults who love him but are incapable of understanding him in the midst of their own grief and shortcomings. I did worry at the beginning that the precocity would become grating, but it’s been so long since I read an actual novel that I just fell into the story and was absolutely crying by the end. Foer’s writing is sometimes stream-of-consciousness but wonderfully rhythmic and revealing. I appreciated the bare truth of the revolving first-person narrators, even as I was incredibly frustrated at their respective inabilities to convey this truth to each other. The story reinforced my utter desire for clear and unfettered communication and understanding, and made me inexpressibly sad in a very Aristotelian emotion-purging sort of way. I felt, I felt viscerally by the end of it, the comprehensive destruction of war and the awful inescapable power of tragedy and the incredible anger of the person who can’t do anything about it. I’ve never been so moved by pretentious mixed-media inserts. The flip-book at the end almost put me over the edge.
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