Eleanor Rigby

I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and found it extremely sad. It was released in 2005. There are three narrators in this book. One is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy. The two others are his grand-parents. I will start with the grand-parents, and move on with Oskar afterwards. 

The three narrators are very different. Thomas Schell and his wife both grew up in Dresden, which is a German city that was bombed by the Allied forces in 1945. Thomas was in fact in love with Anna, his wife's sister, who was killed in the bombings. Because of this, Thomas Schell cannot speak. However, in the passages he narrates, his sentences seem to have no end. Oskar's grandmother's style is different: she likes to put spaces between her sentences. 

Oskar is a pretty special boy. He only wears white, he writes letters to famous people, and he invents things to keep himself from getting sad. Oskar's dad died in the September 11 attacks. Oskar is looking for something he believes will help him get through his grief, and we follow his journey through the city of New York. The city of New York is very important in the book. Oskar has to meet a lot of people on his quest, and he chooses to meet them in alphabetical order instead of doing it geographically, and so his journey seems endless. Plus, he walks everywhere. As I said, Oskar meets a lot of people, and at one point of the story, he thinks of the song "Eleanor Rigby": "All the lonely people. Where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?"

This book made me realize how traumatizing 9/11 must have been for the United States. Apparently, I had never thought about it enough. I was pretty young when it happened, and at that time, all I could think of was that perhaps Americans were exaggerating a bit with their patriotism. I had to read a fiction book to understand that they had really been hurt.

The book is also interesting visually: there are pictures of doorknobs, pages with lots of words written in differents colors as in a stationery store, and pages corrected in red.