Critical Review of 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

Introduction

lonathan Safran Foer was born in t977 and increased up in Washington D.C. As a student at Princeton, he won the Creative Writing Thesis prize each year he was an undergraduate. While a junior, he began work on an anthology of works inspired by the bird boxes of Joseph Cornell. Entitled A Convergence of Birds, the book was published in 2001. Foer graduated in 1999 with a degree in Philosophy. That same year/ he traveled to the Ukraine to research his family history. Though he claims it was not planned, the trip eventually resulted in his first novel, which he began writing as a thesis project under Joyce Carl Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides. Following graduation, Foer worked at a series of jobs including morgue assistant, receptionist, math tutor, ghostwriter, archivist, farm sitter, advertising consultant and receptionist, while continuing to write. The author's short stories began appearing in such noted publications asThe Paris Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Conjunctions, and he won the Zoetrope: All Story Fiction Prize in 2OOO. Everything Is Illuminated, the book begun when he was an undergraduate, was published in 2002. It is the story of a young Jewish man's trip to the Ukraine to search for the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Blending detail and fiction, the juvenile man is entitled lonathan Safran Foer.

Summary

On September 11, 2001, Thomas Schell, father of Oskar Schell, died in the second of the Twin Towers, but not before calling home several times and leaving messages on the answering machine. The family buried an empty coffin. Two years later, nine-year-old Oskar has developed coping mechanisms that include avoiding elevators, subways, and boats, playing a tambourine to soothe his nerves, and inventing in his mind rescue devices such as the birdseed shirt. One day, Oskar finds a key in a blue vase at the back of his father's closet, untouched since the worst day, as he calls 9/11. Thomas and Oskar used to have Reconnaissance Sundays, in which Oskar would follow clues to find objects that Thomas had hidden somewhere in the city. When Oskar finds the key, enclosed in a small envelope with the word Black written on it, he decides that this is one last game left by his father and begins the search to see what Thomas left him. Oskar's article is alternated with the article of his grandparents. Grandma, as he calls her, immigrated to the United States from Dresden following the bombings in World War II. In New York, she runs into Thomas Schell, who was originally engaged to marry her sister Anna. Anna was pregnant with Thomas's child when she died in Dresden, a trauma that left Thomas mute. The two married, but Thomas left when he learned Grandma was pregnant. He returned to Dresden, but wrote letters every day to his son, also named Thomas, never actually sending anything but blank envelopes. Determined to locate the secure that goes with the key, ...