#1 - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I recently bought a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and although I haven’t read it yet, I am somewhat familiar with the storyline.  The narrator is a nine year-old boy, and although I don’t believe it is explicitly addressed in the book, many readers have considered the possibility that he is autistic.  Official diagnoses aside, the narrator nevertheless displays unique and non-traditional thought processes, which are complemented by several non-traditional formal elements present in the book.  In addition to multiple photographs, there are also pages with colourful doodles, pages with just sequences of numbers, and pages in which the spacing between the lines of text becomes smaller and smaller until the text is layered and unreadable.  The narrator’s father died in the 9/11 attacks, and the last few pages of the novel feature the narrator considering what it would be like if his father hadn’t died.  As he is thinking about this, he reverses the order of a series of pictures of a man falling from one of the towers so that he is falling upwards, and this reverse flip book makes up the final fifteen pages of the novel.

Although I always think it’s interesting when authors play around with form, I find that I have a tendency to appreciate the idea of it more than the actual practice.  I often glance at the pictures of skim quickly over the footnotes and then return to the text as quickly as possible.  It’s hard to say why, but I never really value this kind of material in the same way that I value the text/narration.  Even when I was very young and read books (or was read to) with a lot of illustrations, they always seemed superfluous to the story itself.  It will be interesting to see if I still skim over these elements in Extremely Loud because it really seems as though they are meant to underscore the narrator’s approach to or understanding of the world around him, and shouldn’t be considered as simply superfluous or extraneous.  At any rate, I hope it will be a good exercise for me to try and learn how to read in different ways.

I actually initially wanted to talk about Tree of Codes (also by Jonathan Safran Foer), but we have already covered it in class.  Although there is one quick thing I would like to say about Tree of Codes that I don’t believe was mentioned in class.  It’s actually a cut-up version of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, but through JSF’s manipulation of its form, it became an entirely new book with an entirely new content.  In that sense, I think it is perhaps the most radical example of how form can e/affect meaning.  The Visual Editions website for Tree of Codes has a lot of interesting images and videos related to the book.