Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: The Trailer

Jonathan Safran Foer is really good at writing books people want to turn into movies. I didn't ever see Everything is Illuminated, but I did read it and liked it well enough. This next one though, I'm going to see for sure. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is in my top three of all-time favorite books and while I know the movie can't live up to the book's magic, I do hope it comes close. 

To read or not to read: Eating Animals

I really like Jonathan Safran Foer. I absolutely loved Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and I very much enjoyed Everything is Illuminated. I am interested in reading his non-fiction work Eating Animals, but I am hesitant to do so.

In my second year of college I took a contemporary moral issues philosophy course and one of the moral issues we covered was animal rights. I had to watch a horrific video made by PETA that detailed the cruel conditions associated with the meat market in the US (for those of you interested it's called Meet Your Meat). After I watched that video I didn't touch a piece of meat for three years.

After the sting wore off I began eating meat again. I've never been a big meat eater - I typically avoid red meat and eat poultry in moderation - but I do enjoy the option. Being a veggie was hard - not for me but for the people in my life. I always felt like a burden going to a friend or relative's house for dinner. Splitting appetizers while eating out didn't work out well for me, as the vegetarian apps were generally less appealing to my carnivorous friends. All in all, I felt like a liability whenever I ate with people.

I'm 95% certain that if I read this book I will go back to being a veggie, as it details the ethical issues involved with eating animals. I don't want to be an uninformed eater (which I don't think I am, especially after reading Skinny Bitch a few years back - a Nazi diet book whose agenda is to make you a vegan), but on the other hand - pardon the cliché - ignorance is bliss. Revisiting these horrendous topics will undoubtedly upset me and propel me into an indefinite state of vegetarianism and I'm just not sure I'm reading to do that again. So, to read, or not to read?

Trailer: Everything Is Illuminated

Yesterday I posted a review of Everything Is Illuminated. A few of you recommended the film so I went ahead and googled the trailer. After wathcing the trailer, I'm not sure if I'm going to hunt down the movie anytime soon. Everything Is Illuminated doesn't feel like a book that would translate well to the big screen. Am I wrong?

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything Is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Safran's second novel) was my favorite read of 2010 and of Foer's two works, I've got to say I enjoyed his later work more than his first. However, that's not to say Everything Is Illuminated should be missed. Like EL&IC, this is a truly powerful story that I won't soon forget.

Foer has a knack for creating unique and memorable characters. In Everything is Illuminated we meet Alex, a Ukrainian who struggles to speak English (he tells us "my second tongue is not so premium"), yet acts as a translator for the character named Jonathan Safran Foer - a young American Jew in search of a woman, Augustine, who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alex offers a lot of comic relief, as his spoken English sounds more like a misplaced thesaurus than the colloquially spoken English Americans often hear.

Foer combines a few different stories into this one book - that of Alex and Jonathan, as narrated by Alex and his broken English, and their search for Augustine and also the story Jonathan the character is writing. Then there are a series of reflective letters between Alex and Jonathan throughout. The novel as a whole evoked many different emotions, particularity the story the character Jonathan Safran Foer is writing that centers around Brod. It's both beautiful and heartbreaking, detailing the life of a girl who struggles to find happiness:

She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Everything is Illuminated explores themes of identity and memory, and how our relationship with the past affects our everyday present. It challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be intelligent and also offers a bold vision of the Holocaust. It questions what love really means and asks how we know when it's real:

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

This book is anything but ordinary. As I mentioned earlier, it is a complex work of post-modern fiction, but well worth the effort. If you are looking for a book that will move you and encourage you to think about ideas in a new way, this is it.

Publisher: First Perennial, 2002

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm not quite sure how to review this book, except to say I loved it to pieces. Foer's novel is very post-modern, so it is hard to give it a traditional review. This is a book about making sense of the world around you, coping with loss and learning how to live. 

It was one of the the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

As I mentioned, it's hard to offer a traditional review of this novel, so I am going to offer a list of thoughts:

• Oskar Schell, the novel's protagonist, is one of the most interesting, hilarious and lovable characters I have read since Nichole Krauss' Leo Gursky (The History of Love). 
• This book has more passages that I underlined and circled than any book I've read to date. Foer's prose is beautiful and truthful, and speaks to the reader in a way that makes the ideas very relatable. 
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is my favorite piece of fiction I have read so far this year.
• This is one of those books that reminded me why I love books so much. 

Some of my favorite passages:

"I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."

"sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her."

"It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely and so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?"

"Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?"

"I regret that is takes a life to learn how to live"

All in all, I truly can't recommend this book enough.

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2005

I would measure your wrist twice

Reading now: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.

I'm not even halfway finished, but so far I am head over heels in love with this book. I don't want it to end.