Actually, I’ve been neglecting the old blog here lately for whatever the reason.
And the reason I write right now is that I have read a book that I’d like to recommend:
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The book details nine year old Oskar Schell’s quest to discover the lock that fits the key he found in a vase in his late father’s room. One sidenote: his father died in the World Trade Center tragedy. Sidenote deux: Oskar lives in New York, and according to his calculations, there are many, many locks out there.
I never finished Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated, even though it features a dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Jr. Mr. Foer, if you are reading this because you googled up AlphaLima, no hard feelings, huh? I sometimes get cases of Book ADD. I have about eight unfinished books on my bedside table right now. Do you think I’ll ever finish Ghost Dogs of the South? Or Nick Hornby’s Slam? Or Where There’s Smoke, There’s Flavor? Or even Open Ground, Seamus Heaney’s collected poems? Who knows?
In his second novel, Foer will break your heart without remotely making it seem like he is writing to break your heart. He will make you laugh–Oskar is a funny kid at times. And, for me, here’s the most impressive part of the book: huge events occur in the plot, and you know that they had to be that way when you read them but you never saw the plot event coming until it appeared right there on the page. Speaking of pages, you should get the print copy of the book because the text has illustrations and interesting layouts and the like that, on casual flip-through, seem gimmicky but, when viewed in the context of the novel, are absolutely powerful and necessary.
A coworker of mine took my recommendation (for once. Many times my coworkers walk away from me muttering “Jackass” under their breath), but she purchased the book on CD so she missed out on the pictures. She said there were times where she thought she was going to have to pull off the road because the story brought tears to her eyes. She has since purchased the print version and is rereading it.
In his cleverness and vulnerability, Oskar is worldly enough to want to use profanity but conscientious and naive to the point that he is “not allowed” to curse. His workaround? To use words and phrases that sound like the profanity he is tempted to utter.
Buy this book. I don’t recommend books much, but this is the best book I’ve read in a while. And well, if you don’t like it, you can do as young Oskar suggests to the limo driver on the way to the cemetery where they are about to inter his late father’s coffin (but not his late father):
“Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.”
