I finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer on the plane and it was lovely, from the start to finish – the kind of book where I am slightly sad to be at the last few pages, to know I’m nearing the end. It’s told from the point of view of several characters and is all about loss and love and often, both at the same time.
some excerpts:*
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either, but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were things I wanted to tell him but I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
Did she feel pity for me, did she want me to suffer?
The next morning she led me to the coat closet, which faces the living room, she went in with me, we were in there all day, although she knew he wouldn’t come until the afternoon, it was too small, we needed more space between us, we needed Nothing Places, she said “This is what it’s felt like, except you weren’t here.” We looked at each other in silence for hours.
“Stalin found about about the community [of artists] and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn’t feed themselves, because they couldn’t get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they do!” “They starved?” “They fed each other! That’s the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!” “I don’t know if I believe in the afterlife.” “Neither do I, but I believe in the story.”
*note: you can read these without learning plot points and I do recommend reading the book, if you have the chance.