Since his father’s death, Oscar has been living with his mother and with his grandmother living across the street. I love how he sometimes just rambles on and on about things he knows – and even sometimes about things he wishes he didn’t know.
He starts going to them one by one and has lots of interesting encounters but doesn’t seem to have any luck with finding the right Black. Oscar decides to find the lock this key fits into and he goes about this by visiting every person named Black in the phone book. Oscar and his father used to play all kinds of games so when Oscar finds a key in an envelope labeled Black in a blue vase in his father’s closet, he thinks it’s one last treasure hunt. This is the story of young Oscar Schell, a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the 9-11 attack. I don’t think I can do it justice but I’m going to try to write something that can recommend this novel to others so you too can be blown away by this fantastic novel. Jonathan Safran Foer painted such incredible pictures with his words and I was just blown away by it. I do not have words to really express how great this book was. The rest of the novel is focused on Oskar’s relationship with his family and his search for the mysterious key, which he believed would help him find a mention of his father.‘/…/ one hundred ceilings had become one hundred floors, which had become nothing.’ (p. After his father’s death, the kid starts to struggle with insomnia, depression, and, most importantly, his fears and phobias. Oskar is an extremely emotional and smart for his age child. In the novel, Oskar Schell is a nine-year-old boy whose father Thomas died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center building on September 11, 2001. Moreover, he once claimed that he, as a New Yorker, found it impossible to not write about it as he felt it was his patriotic duty. One thing that is very important to state in the beginning of this post is that Foer’s personal emotional trauma was the driving force that made him write the novel as writing has always been a way for authors to cope with tragedy. It was 4 years after the terrible tragedy that occurred on September 11th, 2001 in New York. Jonathan Safran Foer wrote his second novel ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ in 2005 when he was 28 years old.
It is more important now than ever to remind ourselves what really matters, and the best way to do it is through art, especially if that art is based on real events. We live in scary times when terrorist attacks, man-made disasters and revolutions occur one after another, and governments are actively allowing their citizens to be harmed & killed. It could be argued that the terms “postmodernism” and “tragedy” lie uneasily beside each other. It’s a book, a film and a jumping-off point for thinking for Inna Oganeisan – this blog post was first published in autumn 2016 here.
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