Bookworm Month

*This post is dedicated to my daughter, who is curious and widely read and drops the appropriate literary quote when necessary, e.g. “Well, remember Mommy, 'Life is an X-rated soap opera,' T.S. Garp.” My daughter, who is so busy with school and rowing and friends that it seems like we never have enough time to talk about the important stuff, e.g. books. And who, most importantly, alerts me when the supplies of dark chocolate in the house are growing dangerously low.

I just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I got it a few years ago, started reading it, and put it down. The tone was off-putting. Somehow, at the time, the very virtuosity of the language evoked so much distance between me and the main character that I just didn’t make a love connection with the book. Perhaps 9/11 was also too recent an event to wrap my head around its novelization.

Luckily for me, another January has rolled around, the month I read, when curling up on the couch with a blanket and a book is about all I care to do. (I usually ask for books for Christmas, and my generous family and Santa usually come through. Then I chomp through them like the frustrated bookworm that I am.)

I’m so glad I came back to the book and was open to receiving it. The events and themes the author tackles—9/11, World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, loss, grief, family, childhood, love, aging—are sweeping and enormous. Yet they are brought down to the level of ordinary life in this novel. They are rendered incredibly closely through the eyes of a child, Oskar Schell, who is struggling to make sense of losing his father on 9/11. His attempts to think his way through his loss are moving in their fruitlessness. So is his discovery of a key, and his search for the lock that it will open. He hopes the key is a final clue left by his father. As he looks for the lock, Oskar makes the human connections that ultimately help him figure out a way to keep moving forward through life. He finds a way to emotionally connect with others to get through impossible grief.

It’s interesting that Foer shows us 9/11 through the eyes of a child who likely has Asperger’s. I think it might not be too far-fetched to say that Oskar’s viewpoint is much like how we ourselves have reacted and tried to deal with this enormous tragedy. We focus on the facts we can report and quantify. The time at which the first plane hit. The temperature at which the metal frame of the building melted. The number of people killed. Those are the facts that we cling to, in our emotional numbness, the things we can process.

In Oskar, I think Foer accurately captures a child trying desperately to make sense of the crazy, messed-up world. As I was reading I was reminded of the images that popped into my head in that half-waking/half-dreaming state right before sleep that I had when I was a kid. In those vivid images, I played with perspective, seeing the world as if I were spinning on a merry-go-round. In other images I was tiny, the size of a mouse, standing in the street staring up at the mountain of a curb in front of my babysitter’s house. The view telescoped even further, so that the world seemed to be receding away from me at a scary rate. In the face of events like 9/11, maybe we are still that child, small in relation to the world and overwhelmed and confused by its scale and speed.

I was also quite moved by the characters’ troubled grappling with words. For various characters, the spoken word (emotion?) contains much power and the written word (intellect?) ultimately fails to convey meaning.

• For Oskar’s grandmother and grandfather, their shared trauma during World War II leads to the failure of true communication and the consequent severing of the human connections that words are meant to create.

1. Oskar’s grandfather loses his ability to speak after he loses his family, his first love, and their unborn child during the bombing of Dresden. The written word—“Yes” tattooed on one hand, “No” on the other, and his notebooks of written responses—is inadequate and fails him. He ultimately cannot respond to the love his wife offers him or the hope (and potential tragedy) that their child represents.
2. Oskar’s grandmother lives her life, has her child and raises him alone. Yet as she types her life story, the pages remain blank. They both write letters that are never received by the intended recipient.

• On 9/11, as he is trapped in the World Trade Center, Oskar’s father leaves a message on the answering machine, a call that Oskar is too paralyzed by fear to receive.

• When Oskar turns on the hearing aid of his octogenarian neighbor, the man is able to hear for the first time in decades. He is able to leave his home and open himself to a new love.

This struggle with words is something I deal with every day. I love them, the sound of them in various languages and accents and dialects; the joyful energy of their utterances and the sweet relief when my words are fully heard. I love reading them, love their tangled roots and interconnections. Love to play one off another, in sound and rhythm and meaning.

But I have trouble remembering words and uttering them with confidence, most acutely when I am speaking in front of a large group. I guess that’s why I like this blog, and why I keep coming back to it despite being pulled in other directions. In a blog post, I feel like I can put words together to form a coherent whole, something I feel frustrated about when I’m speaking. It helps me give a shape to emotions that can often overwhelm me. It’s a record that I’ve lived my life and processed it. It’s an attempt to share my life with others.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close resonated with me in so many ways. For me, it is both the key and the box it opens. It is the world we live in, the people we struggle to love, the grief we grapple with. It’s that reaching out, however we can, to connect with each other.