Heavy Boots and Five Years

           Back in high school, a very dear friend of mine gave me Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close as a gift, and so I read it quite soon after she gave it to me.  I never admitted it to her, because she gave it to me because it was one of her favorite books, but I did not actually like the book…which gave me heavy boots.  At the time, I did not really understand nor like Jonathon Safran Foer’s writing.  I found it confusing and somewhat disorienting, and I especially did not like the fact that the book is never resolved and the whole theme of the book is quite sad, which also gave me heavy boots.  However, five years later my feelings about this book have done a complete 180.  Within the context of this class I have learned to appreciate the way Safran uses media other than writing and the placement of certain text within the book.  In one of the chapters titled “My Feelings,” Oskar’s grandmother talks about the day of 9/11 and how on television they showed “the same pictures over and over” and then continues to repeat the same phrases throughout the chapter, such as “Bodies falling” and “Planes going into buildings” (230-31).  I love how he uses the words woven throughout the chapter to create imagery without using a picture at all.

 I constantly find myself stopping to take in what he is saying and re-reading sections of the book because what he is saying and how he is saying it is just too beautiful to read just once.  His writing is so heartbreaking that I find it hard to read and hard to stop reading all at the same time.  The first moment I realized that this was entirely different book now than when I read it five years ago was when I read Thomas’s first chapter and he says “when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter, I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO… I signify “book” by peeling open my clapped hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO” (17).  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close make me want to keep reading it and re-reading the beautiful language of it, but its’ language also makes me want to cry…which gives me heavy boots.