Falling Up and Having No Room To Bury Anyone Anymore
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Book Review
“Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore?”
Storyline
This book is about a nine-year-old boy called Oskar, who loses his father in the 9/11 attack on World Trade Centre. After the death of his father, he finds a key and sets out on a quest to find what the key fits.
Oskar has high functioning autism. Though it isn’t mentioned anywhere in the book, the author stated in an interview that he never thought of Oskar as autistic but added, ‘ which is not to say he isn’t, it’s up for the readers to decide.’ The narration of the book is very interesting because of that.
My Thoughts
This book is different in the sense that we see the grieve through the eyes of a nine-year-old and his constant struggle with himself and with the world of coming to terms with what happened and finding closure.
As for the various quests we set out in hopes of finding what the key fits, we are brought to face the hard truth that no matter where the key led him, it wouldn’t have provided him with any closure about his Dad’s death. And no matter how hard he tried, nothing will provide him closure, he has to find it from within.
Oskar is a pretty intense kid. He gets ramped up in extremely-s and incredibly-s.
He says, “Ten thousand birds die every year from smashing into windows. I invented a device that would detect when a bird is incredibly close to a building and that would trigger an extremely loud birdcall from another skyscraper and they’d be drawn to that. “
There are pages of the book that are blank on purpose to teach us that grief and pain of losing someone can only be signified by the text of no text.
There are mysterious events like a grandfather who lost his ability to speak, but how? Nobody knows.
There are incredibly close coincidences and near misses that bury the reader in hopelessness and emotional numbness, signifying the mere nature of human relationships.
Oskar wonders,” What about the name of the parts of New York that aren’t in any borough?”
It’s an invisible boundary. These invisible boundaries exist not only between boroughs but also between people. And even though he doesn’t realize it, Oskar is blurring the lines between people during his quest.
The message that book leaves us with is that in this extremely complicated life, even though it may sound obvious, but it is extremely necessary to tell loved ones that we love them before we lose them in any explosions like 9/11 or Dresden or Hiroshima, which are all mentioned in the book.
The book’s final pages are a flipbook (yes, you can flip them) of photos of a man, falling to death from the World Trade Centre. But Oskar reverses the photos so that when you flip through them, the man ‘falls up’.
Oskar feels that history is brutal and wouldn’t it be nicer if it weren’t? Time could somehow run backward as in a movie and dead people could hop up and not be dead?
The book ends when Oskar says, “We would have all been safe.”
