Lost in Space!

I apologize to each of my readers and writers here at Bookstep for my long absence. Thank goodness you carried on a wonderful book chat without me in the last post. It's your blog too! If I get busy or sidetracked or forgetful, feel free to ask, answer, and argue here as you wish.

Moving forward!

I tried to read Nicholson Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory, which is his take on the inner life of a quick and quirky nine-year-old. Some of what I read was cute or clever or kid-like, but he includes stories that little Nory makes up. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's little stories about things that go nowhere. Especially a fictional little kid's made up stories. I don't care. I tune out. It doesn't matter! Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah. That's my problem with most contemporary fiction. I can see them telling me a story, and I want out.

So I dropped the Baker book.

But I've now gone back to a book that has another child's voice in it. This one is done so much better. It's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I started it last night, on 9-11-11, which is fitting since it deals with a child's loss of his father in the attacks on the World Trade Center (yes, Mary, another one). If I remember my reaction from the first time I read it, I loved every other chapter. I loved the chapters written in nine-year-old Oskar's voice. I also loved every other chapter in Foer's other book, Everything Is Illuminated. Maybe I should save time and just read half the book.

From Publishers Weekly

Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.