Jonathan Safran Foer Novels **SPOILERS**

[veela]

so who else is a fan of this guy??? or maybe you hate him? either way, here is the place to discuss everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

i have to admit, i'm a bit rusty on the former because it was years ago that i read it (though i recently saw the movie... HATED it!). however, i just finished extremely loud, so nice and fresh on that one...

thoughts anyone???

[Koalanen]

You HATED the movie? I liked it! Then again, I saw it first and that's what got me into the story. When we were visiting my friend in Germany for 2 weeks, she had the book and I absolutely GORGED it during my stay.

I have to admit that they made Safran Foer into a much stiffer a character in the movie--a sort of a caricatyr of himself, you know? So I was surprised to see in the book that he wasn't a fanny bag toting hero, hehe. Still, I'm glad I saw the movie. I liked it, even if it really dwelled on the silliness of the novel.

My favorite bits about Everything is Illuminated were the parts about Brod and her life. This guy sure makes mundane things and ugly things into something magical through words! One person commented in my book journal that he is similar to Gabriel Carcia Marquez in that manner, and although I have read only one of his books (Love in the Time of Cholera--loved it!), I agree. The style is very similar. Grotesqueness becoming beauty, beauty becoming sublime.

When I'll come back on Sunday I'll post a link to what I wrote about Illuminated and Incredibly Close earlier in my book journal. Cuz I'm lahzee! Hee.

I liked Incredibly Close, but there was also something that kind of bothered me. I didn't embrace it quite as unconditionally as I did Illuminated. Doesn't mean that it's still not a better a read than most on the market these days!

[veela]

i read illuminated so long ago and loved it so much that i was so excited for the movie. and i was really let down. the feeling of the book just didn't come across at all to me. and without the story of Brod, it just didn't click the same way. by the way, that was probably my favorite part too.

i don't otherwise remember too much... i really have to revisit that one. i just remember being captivated and crying my eyes out at the end (because of grandpa and also being so sad it was over!!!)

as for incredibly close, i think enough time had passed between me reading the two books that i wasn't really comparing them as far as the author. i really liked the voice of Oskar (but i had just recently finished "the curious incident of the dog in night time" and it did seem really similar to the main character in that book).

i just think he does such a wonderful job of keeping the characters interesting and taking a story that is tragic (just like you said) and creating beauty out of it.

did you notice how he did the chapter where the grandfather was telling the story of what happened that night back in dresden??? it's a ton of run-on sentences, which really help create the feel of it... the panic, the rushing, the confusion. and then, unexplicably, there were all these little red editing marks. and if you look at it, it almost looks like blood and little bombs falling over the pages... i thought that was so powerful.

[Koalapupu]

Oh yes, I also grieved that the book was over! So the first thing I did when we landed in the US was to march into Half Priced Books and buy a copy for myself. I just wanted to make sure that I would have a copy in my hands whenever I needed it!

I didn't think about the Dresden bit that way! That's interesting. My immediate feeling was that he had written down all those painful thoughts--and then all his son (or who was it...) could do was to edit the spelling, and thus concentrate on something very insignificant in the end. Almost like shrugging him and his experiences off. Now I want to see the book again to see the "bombs"!

[veela]

wow... i didn't really see it that way. that's also an interesting take. though i think when reading that bit, the reader doesn't yet know that the son found him. and had he ever read/found the letters??? i can't remember now!

i also loved the way he put bits of the notebooks in... like the pictures or the one line pages like "do you have the time?" those visual elements really put you right inside the story.

[Koalainen]

Definitely! I liked those pictures. I read some reviewer who absolutely TRASHED Safran Foer--not only his books, but his "personality" as well (deeming him an egomaniac and whatnot, based on zero experience), and this guy also hated the pictures. Apparently he found them too pretentious because he found Safran Foer pretentious. So weird. I think reviewers have all the right to trash something if they find it bad, but it sounded more like Safran Foer had personally insulted this guy! Weird.

Anyways! Just wanted to say that I liked them. Here are finally what I thought about Incredibly Close (it's very short, and at the very end) and Everything is Illuminated which is a bit longer.

I really now need to read The Tin Drum, because that also has a main character called Oskar (all the way to the same spelling) who plays a tin drum wherever he goes and is very loud. Foer's Oskar plays a tambourine wherever he goes, and is just as small as Grass's Oskar.

(Jess--in the same entry with Incredibly Close I talk a bit about A Widow for One Year, if you're interested!)

EDIT: I'm so lame. I came here to post real quick as anonymous, and then screwed up the tags so I had to log in to modify... Wow.

[veela]

i don't get reviewers like that... like you said, it is one thing to not like someone's writing (be it style, story, etc) but quite another to just attack the person! i think some people could certainly see him as pretentious but i think he is just different and it threatens people. he isn't afraid to mix things up and be a bit inventive and that, to me, is part of what makes him such a great writer. he is unconventional.

i just love the way he intertwines story lines. and the little surprise twists and turns and things that make you cry all done with very simple, yet compelling language. it's normally a person's writing style, more than the story itself, that draws me in. and i don't like overblown stuff but just simplicity. when someone takes every day language and observations and puts them down in a way you hadn't considered but it makes you go "yeah... i feel that too" you know??

there was a line like that from Incredibly Close that went something like "you can't protect yourself from sadness without also protecting yourself from happiness."

and while that's not like mind-blowing insight or anything, just the way it was told and in the context really stood out to me...

[Koalapupu]

veela said:

there was a line like that from Incredibly Close that went something like "you can't protect yourself from sadness without also protecting yourself from happiness."

and while that's not like mind-blowing insight or anything, just the way it was told and in the context really stood out to me...

Exactly! Quite often he does this trick where he points out something blatantly obvious that no one has every put to words before. Kind of like "Hey, my 5-year old could've drawn that pic" but the kid never did--someone else did it first. I like it because it makes me feel even more connected to the story. Just like you said, it's easy to relate to, but it's still not just plain facts but it's somehow incredibly poetic or just really out of the left field. I guess I would call Foer's books a surprising reading experience.

I think this one reviewer thought Foer was pretentious because he used these well-known tragedies to pull the heart strings of his readers (the Holocaust, 9/11) but... he does it so well. And obviously he himself was affected by these events through his relatives. I don't understand why he shouldn't write something so beautiful out of these tragedies? There have been worse books written about terrible events, more with dollar signs in their eyes than anything else.

I did think that Incredibly Close was written maybe a little too early after 9-11. I would like to remember this book and read it again in, say, 10 years and see whether my view on it has changed. I wonder how kids who didn't see footage of 9-11 on its day will react to this book. It must be different than for us. Now it kind of felt like reading a fictional story about my grandmother's funeral right after I got home from there... A bit too close, a bit too touchy to be able to read it in any objective manner.

[veela]

i guess i can see what you mean with it being too close to the time of the event... but i just read it now (5 years after the fact) so i didn't have the same take. though it's not like you can so much as turn the tv on these days without the reminder of it being thrown in your face so it's not as though we're all that far from it...

i don't think he used it. i think as a new yorker who was affected, he took it as inspiration. but i think that the way he did it was fantastic. the book wasn't actually ABOUT it, it was about Oskar's loss. and his trying to comprehend it all. same with the holocaust issues in his books. it's more about how generations after will be/are affected by such tragedies and not so much the events themselves. it personalizes them and i think that is part of what makes them more touching.

[P a t r i c k]

I loved Everything is Illuminated, I highly reccomend reading the book first before watching the movie!

[veela]

pat said:

I loved Everything is Illuminated, I highly reccomend reading the book first before watching the movie!

did you like the movie??? i just wasn't impressed...

[Koalapupu]

Although the movie was so different from the book I'm glad I saw it first because otherwise I might not have gotten interested in the book in the first place (none of my Finnish friends have read it). Then, I found the book ten fold superior to the movie ;D