Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer


My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I had higher expectations than where I felt this book landed. I think in part, I'm not a big fan of the autistic narrator's viewpoint. I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime a couple of years back, and this felt too similar. Also, it was so extremely depressing. I know I probably should have been prepared for this factor, due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, but I found myself feeling lonely for the entire duration of the book, and I attribute it to the fact that every single character was fighting a failing battle against loneliness and isolation.

That stated, there were passages that captured me. Foer's style has a poetic and artistic beauty.
For example:

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living" (113).

"The books had been buried, so I hid this time behind a group of trees, I imagined their roots wrapped around books, pulling nourishment from the pages, I imagined rings of letters in their trunks...a leaf fell, it was yellow like paper" (114).

"I took the world into me, sent it back out as a question: 'Do you like me?'" (117).

"I didn't feel empty. I wish I'd felt empty. People waving shirts out of high windows. I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone" (231).

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