I love a book with a mysterious key - Day 18
I’ve moved on to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Is it in bad taste to say I wouldn’t mind having this writer’s babies? It is. I’m sorry. But it’s true. And at the moment it’s the most intelligent thing I have to say (which is not at all) about the book, I’m too besotted for good words.
Then again, maybe he would sire a child like Oskar, his protagonist. I don’t know if I could love a kid like that. I love reading it because of the distance and because Safran Foer wastes so few words. The details mesmerize. The layers of family and history and emotions lock together and form walls around me so that twice today my own family came knocking and I didn’t know how to open a door and let them in. I was lost in the story.
How does he do that?
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
November 18th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Is this a YA novel? I probably should know this.
And you’re better, pray tell?
November 19th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Oh. My. God.
I had a similar reaction when I read the book.
Holy F*cking Dialog Envy, Batman.
November 19th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
Also, “Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake” has become part of the family lexicon.