Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer. The book is an example of visual writing, emerging from a school of contemporary postmodernism which challenges the technical limitations of the novel to create a more immersive work. Foer, like his friend and... Read More

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer. The book is an example of visual writing, emerging from a school of contemporary postmodernism which challenges the technical limitations of the novel to create a more immersive work. Foer, like his friend and sometime collaborator Dave Eggers, is often called a product of the information age. He brings a multimedia sensibility to this book. He uses type settings, spaces and even blank pages to give the book a visual dimension beyond the prose narrative. The book's narrator is an nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Two years before the story begins, Oskar loses his father on 9/11. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father. The main character shares many stylistic similarities (and first name) with Oskar Matzerath from Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, most notably his constant carrying of a tambourine in place of Grass' drum. See Less