Ci si può svuotare da tutte le lacrime?
No Oskar, non si può, ci saranno sempre nuove lacrime anche per vecchi ricordi.

Ho pianto un googolplex di lacrime ed ho avuto le scarpe pesantissime durante tutta la lettura davvero, tanto da farmi un livido per te piccolo...

L'11 settembre 2001 alle 14.45 rientravo da scuola. Ricordo di essere entrata in casa e di aver visto mia mamma impalata davanti alla TV. Non sapevo ancora cosa fosse successo, ma l'ho vista preoccupata. Dopo un paio d'ore, il primo crollo della prima torre colpita, ricordo di aver pensato :"cazzo, che disastro"....il tempo di realizzare il tutto e mi veniva da piangere tutte le volte che al TG passavano le immagini della gente che scappava, ricoperta di cenere, sangue e terrore negli occhi.

Oskar, ti avrei voluto abbracciare per tutto quello che hai passato, ti avrei accompagnato nella ricerca di qualcosa che alla fine era niente. Sono stata male al pensiero che un bambino possa avere così tanta paura di vivere.
La storia di Oskar, del suo papà, dello strano "amore" tra nonna e nonno e di tutte le persone che hanno ruotato intorno alla sua vita è stata straziante, dolorosa, ma il coraggio e la determinazione di questo piccolo uomo beh, non ha eguali.

"Non capivo perché avevo bisogno di aiuto, dato che a me sembrava che quando muore il tuo papà è naturale avere le scarpe pesanti, e che se non le hai, allora sì che ti serve aiuto."

Zabolała mnie ta książka. I wzruszyła. Nawet bardzo.

Extremely beautiful and incredibly lachrymose.

Profoundly moving, beautifully written with deep compassion and empathy for human grief, for the tragic moments that define our lives and characters. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell will stay with me, I think, for a very long time.

I finished late last night (early this morning) and immediately got out of bed to look up a feature written by Ian Brown, published in The Globe & Mail on September 15th, 2001. I've remembered it to this day, because Brown wrote so eloquently about the question: "Would you rather fly to your death, or burn to it?" (The things we can't get out of our minds) There were two photographs that illustrated the story: one of a group of people leaning out of the broken windows of one of the Twin Towers; the other of a man falling (jumping) from one of them. Very similar to the ones in EL&IC.

Foer takes us convincingly into the mind of an extremely (but not unbelievably) sensitive boy whose father had to make the decision whether to fly or to burn. Oskar's journey to put some sense around the circumstances of his father's death, and the parallel stories told by his grandmother and grandfather, is a remarkable literary accomplishment of both characterization and plot. It is incredible story telling, period.

The textual 'gimmickry', as some have called it, is evocative of Vonnegut, in that it sheds an obliquely-angled light on these characters, and their struggles to communicate--after trauma--their deepest feelings, their shame and their guilt, their loss and their grief. These things that are so difficult to render in words. Foer creates a character whose trauma left him mute. He creates a deaf character who reduces every individual to one word. He creates a character who has not attained the level of cognitive or emotional development to express his grief. He creates a character who, at the moment of his death, is leaving an unanswered/unanswerable message on an answering machine.

These are characters who all, in different ways, cannot communicate their truth, cannot connect to those they love, at a moment in their lives of unimaginable trauma. Actually, at a moment of vicarious trauma such as that we all experienced close to 10 years ago. Vicarious trauma = survivor's guilt, and this is a novel that really explores that.

In the aftermath of trauma, when we lose the ability to communicate in words, this is what our minds do: they fixate on objects that appear disembodied; they blur the distinctions between what is real and what is not. They run thoughts and ideas together in ways that lack any kind of linear logic or coherence. While experiencing trauma and grief and survivor's guilt, we make choices that we would never make if we were in "our right minds" and we exhibit behaviour that appears irrational. Would you choose to fly or burn to your death?

We descend, in our grief, to isolation, to catatonia--temporary or lasting--and sometimes, to madness.

Foer's novel shows us his characters' pain. So that when we see a photograph of a doorknob, or a key, or a blurred flock of birds -- these visual images connect to textual ones and then resonate with themes. It is more akin to how poetry works than how literature usually does.

Isn't this exactly what we want a novel to do? It is to me.

I would rip into Foer if I believed his textual gimmickry was in any way manipulative, derivative or unnecessary. I think the opposite: it reveals character, it cuts through sentiment, and it brings the reader into the characters' minds to a depth that would be absolutely impossible with straightforward narrative style. Without it, I believe the story and Oskar would have lost a dimension that it needed to avoid the very accusations of manipulativeness and sentiment that have been made against it.

I hate that I am defending Foer against the nay-sayers in this review, when what I actually want to do is examine everything that he did so very right, so incredibly perfectly and extremely well, to bring this story to light.

Five stars, unequivocally. A must-read.

After reading a few reviews about this, it turns out my expectations were far too grand. 2 of 10 stars

I picked this book up two days ago to read the first page (I personally think you can tell a lot about a book from the first page) and was hooked. I'm in the middle of another book, which is a good book, but the jarring nature of the prose reeled me in. The first chapter is called, "What the?" which is exactly what I was thinking. I was instantly reminded of another great book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, where you actually experience the book as well as read it. While I wouldn't want every book to be written like that, because it's a bit like riding a roller coaster in the dark with strobe lights, it sure is fun every once in a while.

Jonathan Safran Foer, the author, writes the tale of a nine year old boy named Oskar Schell, whose father was in the World Trade Center when the planes flew into them on September 11th. I think its fair to say that the boy becomes extremely troubled after his father's death, but with the unconventional childhood he had, it didn't take much to push him over the edge. His father was an atheist and Oskar wasn't raised to believe in an afterlife or heaven or that people have spirits.

When no body is recovered, his mother buries an empty coffin and she and Oskar have this conversation: "It's just an empty box." "It's more than an empty box." "Why would I want to spend eternity next to an empty box?" Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is there," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!"

The book also tells the story of Oskar's paternal grandparents. The narration changes when both tell their own story. When his grandmother writes, there are no paragraphs and no quotations marks. Lots of odd spacing and most sentences get their own line. She's kind of crazy herself which you know by how she reacts when watching Oskar in his school's play of Hamlet and her conversations with Oskar. Oskar's grandfather...well...that's when you really see crazy. The author uses the most license with him and parts of the book are downright bizarre. Like the eight pages with nothing on them. Or when he starts to write smaller and smaller so that two entire pages are just dark black scribbles because some many words are on top of themselves.

It's more than just tricks on the page, however. The story is really about grief and how Oskar chooses to grieve for his father and how Oskar's grandparents grieved after losing much of what they loved when their city of Dresden was bombed in World War II.

When Oskar finds a key in an envelope with the word "Black" written on it inside a vase in his parent's bedroom, he sets out to discover what it unlocks. He goes about this by finding every person with the last name of "Black" in the five boroughs of New York City and spends almost a year going out on the weekends to ask Aaron, Abel, Amber etc. if they know anything about the key. A few interesting characters and stories get told through this storyline, but the real beauty of this book is how it made me remember and react to the horror of 9/11 again. You kind of forget....with the War on Terror, and the Iraq War and all of the stories that have happened during the last six years how horrible it was to watch those burning buildings go down on live TV. The last 14 pages of the book are pictures Oskar got off of a Portuguese web site that had a picture of a man who had jumped from the building. He put them in reverse order and you see this body in the air going up. The wish of a nine year old boy.

This book is exactly what its title says it is. Extremely and incredibly written. It's different, but I sure liked it.

On top of the already devastating wreckage left from the September eleventh attacks, Foer describes a bittersweet form of intergenerational pain. (It eventually became an unpopular albeit Oscar-nominated film [which days later I watched & was disappointed with]) this is a huge deviation from his true masterwork (for I suppose that one is more universally great and, unlike this one, less personally divisive:) Everything Is Illuminated. It is so radically different and almost as complex and perfect as his first work. (Speaking of which, where & when will we see Foer's 3rd!?!?) Radical because in this one the reader flips through pages in a suspect fervor to navigate a, lets say it, mixed media novel. Will it succeed?

The infinitely creative, but mega precious child's voice is filled with its share of Truth and Whimsy. In this fictional world, suddenly everyone is unrude and all denizens of New York City are complex in a positive way. (...though there is a reason.) Oscar Schell, perhaps the biggest problem I see in the novel (The! Protagonist!), truly reflects a New York City post 9-11 that's probably all too sure of itself for its own good. Because it has to be.

When I first this read this my socks exploded out the window and into the lake. Foer’s debut Everything is Illuminated impressed me with its Russian-Engrish humour (faultlessly rendered) and inventive helter-skelter structure, but became melodramatic when discussing the Holocaust and unnecessarily perverse in its historical narratives. This novel seemed to correct the flaws in his debut and make an impressive use of typographical kookery for direct, emotional blasts. It showed me it was possible to bring esoteric literary tricks to a mainstream audience, to move the reader more than using well-worn literary stuff: poetic language, manipulative drama, etc. (This was before I had read B.S. Johnson, who deployed more impressive book-breaking tricks to similarly devastating ends). But now it’s become popular to dislike Foer—he hasn’t produced a novel in seven years, his Tree of Codes was derivative of B.S. Johnson, this has been turned into a soppy film that I am informed strips all inventiveness from the text. But I still think this book is awesome. All the techniques (don’t say gimmicks—if you say gimmicks you’re dead to me) he deploys here feel essential to the text, and although tackling 9/11 brings Foer to the ice-capped peaks of swooning melodrama (where he wants to be), nothing in here feels gratuitous or unnecessary. Also, there’s something about using unconventional techniques in one of the first post-9/11 novels, that expresses the loss and weight of loss better than any insightful language. These techniques help say the unsaid: they’re cathartic, purging. At the time this book was written emotions were still surging. When read in context it makes all the right moves. So this novel is made of win. Ignore the idiotic movie version and new film tie-in edition. And pray for Foer, he needs us.

How I hate being a hater. Yet, in the most basic sense, this book didn't do much for me. For all the attempts at deep emotional and thematic resonance (i.e.: long lost loves, dead sisters, dead fathers, dead babies, war, war, war) a single tear didn't even come close to escaping my normally hyperactive tear ducts. I have some half-formed theories about why this came through cold for me. Here are a few:

1) The formal experimentation in this book--not the pictures, but the way the text was organized-- was extremely annoying and incredibly hard to read. All the odd spaces in the Grandma prose, all the giant blocks of text in the Grandpa prose, all the dialogue after the attribution in the Oskar prose, it detracted from the content instead of adding to it. I felt like iwasreading something that was trying sohard to have meaning but f a i l i n g.
So it relied on trickery to make itself interesting.

2) There was a lack of basic momentum in the plot. Nothing really ever comes to a boil, because it's always boiling over throughout. Oskar cries all the time (I know why he's crying, but it let the air out of the emotional balloon to see him do it so much). He mentions the messages from his father over and over. His mom is always worried about him for the same reasons. It just felt very repetitious.

3) While it was interesting to consider different wars and atrocities in relation to 9/11, I don't think the book ever risked making any real points about those connections. It just kind of tossed out some terrible things and nudged us and said...isn't this terrible?

4) I never really got interested enough in the grandparents. Their characters were so totally eclipsed by their epic backstory that I couldn't really believe them or see them clearly as actual people.

Of course there were things I liked. Oskar's voice could be really funny and original at times. The minor characters he meets along the way were often wonderful and surprising. And the flashbacks with the father were very tender and affecting.

But on the whole, I just couldn't get on board with this. And since it's a book about something I feel like I should feel something about, it made me feel unfeeling and bad about myself (that's my best shot). Oh well. Heavy boots for me.

LOOK I WROTE A BOOK WITH PICTURES IN IT AND SOMETIMES PAGES OF NONSENSE. I GOT THE IDEA FROM DOUGLAS COUPLAND IN 1991. GIVE ME AN AWARD.

This was horrible. The writing was horrible. The book jumped around and around and was so hard to follow. It was like reading something written by someone who was half squirrel and half crack head. Instead of creating colorful and deep characters using words, he used punctuation. The grandfather spoke using an abundance of useless commas, the grandmother used lots of periods and Mr. Black spoke in sentences using only exclamation points. I was thankful no spoke by asking only questions. If I would have seen a page full of question marks I think I might have thrown the book across the room! I found Oskar to be the only unique and real character in the book, but after awhile he even started to annoy me. His little quirks were too over the top, like the author was trying to compensate and distract the reader from the nonexistent plot. A boy loses his father and finds a key in an envelope with the name "Black" on it. We go through pages and pages of meeting lots of people with the name "Black" only to find out the key had nothing to do with his dad in the first place. He has weird grandparents who like to write him letters about their sex life and who really didn't add anything to the plot of the story that I could tell. Then he digs up his father's empty coffin and fills it with letters, the end. (Seriously?????)

I found the subject matter heart breaking, and did tear up at times, but it's hard not to tear up when anyone talks about that horrible day. I hated the pictures the most. The book had pages of meaningless pictures. But one picture stood out from the rest and made me cringe. He filled over a dozen pages with pictures of someone's loved one falling to their death from one of the burning towers of 9/11. I am outraged by this! Horrible!!!!!!

I don't know if I truly understood or got the full message from this book but I know I enjoyed it from the very first page. It was a story of love but it wasn't a love story. It was funny but it wasn't a comedy. It was sad but it wasn't a tear jerker.

By the second page I'd already stopped to make some notes about my thoughts on Oskar, the young boy whose voice was heard for most of this book. I loved him and his quirky ways, his thought processes, his honesty (most of the time although he did tell quite a lot of lies), his good heartedness and his sense of humour. He made me laugh out loud often and yet he made me want to cry for him too. I suspect he was suffering from a form of PTSD and I simply adored the matter of fact way he referred to his heavy boots when what he was most likely describing was depression or the depths of despair a grieving child would experience in his situation. Oskar had loved his father so desperately and was struggling to cope after losing his dad during the 9/11 terroist attacks .

Whilst we mainly heard from Oskar, we had regular insights into the lives of his grandparents, their lives as children, young adults and from the present time. Their stories continued to bring tears to my eyes and I felt such a sadness at the losses they had experienced. Their stories told of their inability to overcome the traumatic experiences in their own pasts, and the way they had tried to avoid the pain of losing a loved one by trying to avoid love.

I know this summary doesn't do the story justice and it sounds morbid but it really wasn't. I've never heard of this author and can't imagine what other types of books he might write. His story was as unique as his characters so I'm curious to see what else he has out there.