All is quiet on New Year's Day...

I spent most of last week on my parents’ couch with yet another cold (I’m beginning to wonder if a suit against the school teacher who invented Airborne would hold up in court). Luckily I was in the company of a spectacular book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Upon its release several years ago, a review in Vogue piqued my curiosity, although I seldom permit myself to read fiction (too many weighty musicology tomes piling up around my apartment). I was reminded of it again when a cinematic version of another of the author’s novels, Everything Is Illuminated, arrived in theaters. I didn’t catch it, and now I would prefer to read the book first, which may have to wait until next Christmas.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one of those rare and most potent works of art that can cause one to laugh and cry with equal vigor. For some reason, the closest comparison I can think of is Terms of Endearment, the plot of which isn’t really similar at all, except in its subject matter of losing someone close to you. Foer’s novel is ingeniously narrated by Oskar, who at the age of nine is an inventor, jewelry designer and tambourine player, among other things. The story, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, follows Oskar on his quest to unravel a mystery his father left behind when he died on the morning of September 11, 2001.