Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I read this book for a number of reasons. 1) My dad read it ages ago and liked it. And he owned it. 2) Fae read it about a month ago and loved it and 3) The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, is married to Nicole Krauss who wrote History of Love, my favourite book of the year.

The book was beautiful.

I keep reading books that are told from the perspectives of children, and I find them really interesting. These are never regular children - they’re always different, too smart, too imaginative, or something. But using a kid as the narrator allows the author to explore such different thing. A child has far less expectations, far less preconcieved notions and more imagination. Their past is usually an open book, you’re not always waiting for the revelation of a traumatic event, like you often are with adult main characters.

The other thing about this book, similar to Krauss or Winterson, is that it’s all about stories. Telling your story and the story of your family. Personal histories. What can I say, I love stories about stories.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was at times painful. Oskar lost his father in 9/11, and he’s heartbroken. He hurts far too much for a nine year old boy. But at the same time it was inspirational. Because as a nine year old boy, Oskar allows himself to be open to feeling and learning. He trusts people and he forms incredibly close bonds with strangers.

The book is about how everyone is sad, but also how no one is alone. It’s quite beautiful.

“Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and the burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Wheneve rpeople cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weather could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened - like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack - an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.”

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

“When I heard that your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying, ‘I don’t want to die.’ That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

People of the Book

I have been struggling through this book for nearly a month. It’s not long at all, it’s just that I found it less than thrilling. Maybe that’s my fault - I mean, is anything thrilling after a vampire Viking in lycra? No.

Anyway. When I read Geraldine Brook’s Year of Wonders, I found it quite compelling. The characters were sympathetic, the setting was intriguing and the plot was capativating. It was only that the end was pretty odd. So when I saw her new book, People of the Book, at the store, I figured I would enjoy it. It’s about a woman who’s restoring an old Jewish manuscript that’s survived centuries of war and persecution.

It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds. At all. I very rarely give books a bad review, but I really didn’t like this one much. I found the characters very flat and not at all compelling. The book was very well researched, but I found that Brooks tried to continuously show just how well researched it was. She added in facts more as a list than as details important to the plot or setting.

Geraldine Brooks is a journalist writing fiction. To me, she writes like a journalist writing fiction - too much fact based and not nearly enough emotion or literary flare.

This being said, most readers probably wouldn’t notice this - and I didn’t notice it in Year of Wonders. But I’m trained in journalistic style and I know it when I see it.

People of the Book got a lot of really great reviews and it’s acclaimed almost everywhere. But there wasn’t anything in it that spoke to me at all. It was, at best, interesting.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!

To prove that I haven’t just been reading vampire porn (though I have read and thorougly enjoyed many Charlaine Harris books this summer), I give you my review of one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, Ladies and Gentleman, the Bible! by Jonathan Goldstein.

The premise of this book is a retelling of the Bible in a funny way. The writing is witty and sarcastic and thoroughly entertaining. It’s a little bit like the story behind the Bible - what did Eve really think of Adam? Did Jonah get bored inside the whale? Was David really just a giant killer, or was he actually a comedian?

It was a quick read, but in the best possible way. It flowed really well. It was at times insightful and at others hilarious. Or both. Read it and find out for yourself - it’s the funniest book I’ve read since Gods Behaving Badly (which was also awesome and very similar, so check that out too!)

Favourite quotes, as per usual:

“Then came Eve. Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village, and since ever village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down this way: Eve: mayor; Adam: village idiot. Sometimes when Adam would start to speak, Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart, but he would only say stuff like: ‘Little things are really great because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth.’ Eve would often ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing.”

“‘Hi,’ said the snake. ‘In the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It’s fruity.’”

“David wondered what it was going to be like to be the greatest hero who ever lived. He wondered if it would give him sad eyes. He had once seen a hero who had them. With sad eyes, women would see him and think, ‘What sad eyes,’ and they would know that even though he kept up a brave and comical front, killing giants was not all fun, that it left a person with a certain un-asked for gravitas, that it forced you to know things that no one else could ever know and these things left you sadder. But also sexier.”

Dead sexy

Bill…

Or Eric?

Or, for those of you who’ve read the books…

Quinn?

I have been spending far too much time reading Charlaine Harris books. But, for the record, I’d go for Eric. I always like the emotionally unavailable ones…

The Bell Jar

This is proof that I do normally read “good” books, that I’m not always addicted to fluffy vampire sex novels….

When I was desperately trying to get to 50 books in a year last month, I was sitting on the floor in my sister’s apartment, looking through her collection. They needed to be smaller books, of course, but decent enough that it didn’t look like I’d just read 20 trashy novels to hit the 50.

As we know, I didn’t reach 50 books, but now at least my second book of this year’s attempt will be a classic, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Anyway, back to Laura’s floor, with her cat Umber-Shrugs rolling around beside me, a mass of orange fur. I picked up this book, thin enough. “What’s this about?” I asked.

“It’s like the female equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye,” my sister replied. Intriguing. Years ago, I went on a “new classic literature” kick and read The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, 1984 and a few others. And I loved The Catcher in the Rye.

Much like The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar has a very unique voice. The story is told in first person by a character who’s at times both insightful and misguided. However, with The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caufield’s voice and tone are harder to get used to. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is both well spoken and proper.

There’s something haunting about The Bell Jar. The novel is considered to be semi-autobiographical for Plath, who killed herself just a month after its publication.

The Bell Jar is the struggle of every woman against propriety and desire. It was written in the sixties, but from the beginning I felt as if it could have been set in the present. The same hot, dusty, dangerous New York city. The same expectations. The same feeling of entrapment.

Esther is a young woman on the brink of success - she has a scholarship, a prestigious internship, an extravagant trip to New York city. At first you only glimpse her apathy and her sense of loss. But as the book continues, it creeps out of the dark shadows and consumes her.

The Bell Jar is a classic - I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to reading it.

It was easy to identify with Plath’s words, perhaps scarily so if you think about it. But here are some favourite parts:

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

“How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”

“The silence depressed me.  It wasn’t the silence of silence.  It was my own silence.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”