![]() ![]() (When Oskar's mother tucks him up at night, she asks: 'Do you want me to read something to you? We could go through the New York Times for mistakes.') ![]() Safran Foer, in the character of Oskar Schell, a compulsive tambourine-playing, white-clothes wearing, death-obsessed nine-year-old, inhabits all the characteristics of this voice - its self-obsession, its vulnerability, its wit, its particularity - and extends them to the point of parody. It is a voice first adopted 50 years ago by JD Salinger, the one in which he explored how the impossibly nuanced lives of the Glass family might shatter in modern America. It is the New York voice of a child who moves too smartly, thinks too laterally and feels too sensitively for the outside world ever quite to match up to his inner brilliance. But for all its apparatus of confronting the fact of the attack on the Twin Towers, an apparatus which includes, at the back of the book, a reverse flip-through photographic sequence of a person leaping from the burning building, Safran Foer's novel is most specifically a stylistic exercise, an appropriation of a singular American voice. ![]() At first glance, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Safran Foer's post-9/11 book, his attempt to tackle the question of America's principal anxiety: why aren't we safe any more? In this, it joins a growing canon that includes Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, and Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World university literature modules beckon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |