Scintillating
"Scintillate: v to sparkle, either literally or figuratively"Jonathan Safran Foer's latest novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," is absolutely scintillating. It will only frustrate me to try to put into words just how...honest, interesting and true to life the characters in this book are...All I can say is: when I read this book, I want to be it. I want to consume it, pitch a tent and set up a home within it. I want to curl up into a little ball and become the dot on the letter "i" on page 156. I don't want to stop, even for sleep, one of my all time favorite activities!
It's been a while since I enjoyed reading a book so much, and it's not even that the book is gripping at all on a plot-basis...i mean, i'm curious as to what will happen and there is a mysterious element, but mostly i just enjoy the act of reading this book...since it's written in a very personal tone, reading it is an experience in and of itself, aside from the process of digesting the ideas contained within it.
Ok ok i'll let it speak for itself...here's a passage where the main narrator, a precocious 9 year-old who's on a mission to find a lock to fit a key his deceased father left behind, is speaking to an elderly gentleman who lives above his Manhattan flat. As the boy looks around the flat, he notices that the old man has a collection of rocks with tags labelling where each came from:
"That was so fascinating, but one weird thing was that there were lots of bullets on the mantel, too, and they didn't have little pieces of paper next to them. I asked him how he knew which was which. ' A bullet's a bullet's a bullet!' he said. 'But isn't a rock a rock a rock?' I asked. He said, 'Of course not!' I thought I understood him, but I wasn't positive, so I pointed at the roses in the vase on the table. 'Is a rose a rose a rose?' 'No! A rose is not a rose is not a rose!' And then for some reason I started thinking about ' Something in the Way She Moves,' so I asked, ' Is a love song a love song?' He said, 'Yes!' I thought for a second. 'Is love love?' He said, 'No!' He had a wall of masks from every country he'd been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. 'It's not a horrible world,' he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, 'but it's filled with a lot of horrible people!' "
Ugh, I'm sure that out of context that makes no sense, and i sort of hate myself for just leaving it out there like that, but i had to share it with the hope that someone else may be convinced to read the book as well! It's actually my book club book for this month, so I'm looking forward to a...scintillating discussion (which, i hope, will not be arcane...har har).
I have to also say that one of my favorite aspects of the book is that the main character is always inventing things (anything from a bed that had a cavity for your elbow so you could cuddle without having your arm go to sleep to a system where your skin changed color according to your mood so people could be more attuned to each other). It's such a subtle, childlike thing, but it just tickles me...it brings back a creative side I think I sort of lost somewhere along my educational track, where i sought to back up every statement with supporting evidence. "Wouldn't it be cool IF...?" is a really fun mental exercise!
Anyway, yeah, i can't come close to describing just how cool this book is... | posted by Cheryl, 5/31/2006 10:19:00 PM
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