This is a great book. Read the first chapter here:
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer. He also wrote Everything is Illuminated last year, which I haven't read yet. My friend lent me a copy of the new book after I read so many great reviews (including one from my friend Vicky who I trust with all things literary...) that I had to jump on the bandwagon. I got through the first 200 pages yesterday and found myself stopping to copy quotes from the text. Foer has an amazing mind.
His protagonist is a little boy whose father died in the World Trade Center. He finds a key in his dad's closet and spends the next year visiting everyone named "Black" in the NYC phonebook, trying to figure out what the key means.
If you're a fan of consistent punctuation and prose that always seems to know where it's going, this might not be your thing. But if you're into language with a life of its own, and can deal with ambiguity in a big way, read this book.
I read his first book and have this one lying around. Sounds like a good read, hopefully it won't feel so dated. The Delillo book, The Falling Man felt that way kind of.
Posted by: Jerry | September 05, 2007 at 06:39 PM