…yes, I am talking about the book.
I just finished reading it last night. It was extremely well written and incredibly moving. I wish it had been longer, but then I don’t know how much more I could have taken. The subject matter is depressing, but not in such a way that you want to stop reading.
One feels compelled to stick it out with Oskar. You have to go through everything that he is going through and along the way you become friends.
Oskar is very precocious. He’s odd. He can’t sleep. He invents things all the time. He only wears white and writes letters to Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall. He lost his father in 9/11. And I do wish I would be able to meet him and talk to him until there are no words left to say and no tears left to cry.
We meet his Mom through his eyes and we hear from his Grandparents, who both suffered through their own trauma when they were young in the form of the bombing of Dresden at the end of WWII.
I wish I could’ve been there to protect Oskar from what he had to go through. One just wants to wrap him up and keep him safe. I want to say sorry to his Grandparents for what they had to go through. But how can you apologize for something that destroyed someone beyond repair? How can I even feel responsible?
Life is what happens… in all its beauty and in all its ugliness. And Jonathan Safran Foer managed to portray that rather well. We swim or we drown, or we tread water just enough to keep above it and keep breathing.
Characters that we meet in books we read, who stay with us long after the last page was read, are those that I want to have as friends. And maybe in a way they are.
I love books and I have been lucky enough to only ever have read books that I at the very least liked, if not loved. This one is now one of them.
2clouds 