Tag Archives: criticism jonathan safran foer lovely review jonathan safran foer extremely loud and incredibly loud extremely good review of jonathan safran foer

by - 8 Comments

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE by Jonathan Safran Foer

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

A Review of EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (Jonathan Safran Foer) by Joseph Suglia

The literature of September 11, 2001, is never attacked.  When a book speaks of September 11, 2001 (or of terrorism in general), it is more or less guaranteed immunity from criticism; it will, almost inescapably, be greeted with sympathy.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close banks on such sympathy, on such reverence.  The narrative, which concerns a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell in search of a key that would unshell the enigma of his dead father (a narrative stolen, in its basic outline, from Günter Wilhelm Grass’s Die Blechtrommel), could have been written entirely without its scattered references to the terrorist interventions.  Nor is this trauma the only one presented in the novel: the others include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Staten Island Ferry crash, and the Dresden bombings.  Each disaster is generalized to the point at which what is addressed is not a traumatizing event in its specificity, but historical “trauma” itself and the overcoming of trauma through bereavement-inspired creation.

Oskar, the insufferable brat, attempts to complete the work of mourning for his father, Thomas Schell, Jr., a victim of September 11, by compiling an almanac of self-inflicted wounds, the collage of images and letters which is the book we are “reading”–an almanac which, most likely, is assembled sometime in the indefinite future.  (Thomas Shell, Sr.’s manuscript of 4/12/78 is heavily edited (208-216). Who has done the editing? Almost certainly an older version of his grandson Oskar.)  If the term “reading” even applies.  Whenever a “pregnant” image is described, Foer literally re-presents it in the form of a pictorial image.  When a flock of birds rises into the sky, it is not enough that we read of these birds — we must SEE them as well.  Words may not be left in their invisibility; we are presented with supplementary photographs, illustrations, since mere verbality is not enough.  Indeed, the entire novel oozes with misologos — the mistrust or hatred of language / reason — in relation to both its content and its form.  Photographs, yes, and also a superabundance of blank pages and nearly-blank pages.  Space is not used in the manner it is in the works of Edmond Jabès, for instance.

Typography does not substitute for a well-wrought sentence.  Foer abrogates all responsibilities–most specifically, the responsibility to write well.  Why bother when the pyrotechnics of typography is at his disposal?

As far as the writing is concerned, it is composed of nothing other than mind-numbingly, soul-deadeningly repetitive phrases (“heavy boots,” “raison d’etre,” etc.) and Sunday school platitudes: “Sometimes one simply wants to disappear” (184); “There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself” (184); “Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers” (245); “How can you say I love you to someone you love? … It’s always necessary” (314).  Whenever the author writes something that he finds “beautiful” and “true” (165), he congratulates himself on his beauty and truth and tells us that that thing is “beautiful” and “true.”  The entire book reeks of such unearned profundity.  We also learn that most dust is made up of human detritus–a very deep truth indeed, one that Foer also communicates in his essay “Emptiness” (originally published in Playboy) with all of the sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness of the faux naif who serves as the center of the novel, a Sunday-School lecture in which we learn that famous musicians (Ringo Star) and scientists (Stephen Hawking) are unthreateningly approachable: Everything is familiarized.

Perhaps it is wrong to criticize Foer for including so many blank pages in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, since the entire book is a vacuum: null space into which readers may project their own meanings.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

CLICK BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41:

by - 9 Comments

TREE OF CODES by Jonathan Safran Foer / WRITING WITH SCISSORS – by Dr. Joseph Suglia

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

WRITING WITH SCISSORS: A review of TREE OF CODES (Jonathan Safran Foer)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

“[Schulz’s] writing is so unbelievably good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it [?], that more often than not I simply wanted to leave it alone.”
–Jonathan Safran Foer

He should have left it alone.

What does one do if one wishes to become a writer but lacks verbal talent?  If one is Jonathan Safran Foer, one mutes and mutilates magical masterpieces.  Tree of Codes (2010) is an anti-book, assaulting language, crushing words under the weight of optical imagery, a non-book in which words serve a merely ornamental function.  It is an atomic weapon that is pitted against verbality, against writing, against the Word.  It is the stifling of a book, a sequence of stillnesses.  There is more writing–more expressive language–in Max Ernst’s collage novels.

To construct this monstrosity, Foer took an English translation of Bruno Schulz’s magisterial Sklepy Cynamonowe (“Cinnamon Shops,” 1934).  (Please note: The book is NOT called “The Street of Crocodiles,” no matter what Foer might tell you.)  Foer then carved blocks of text out of the English translation, excising Schulz’s beautiful prose poetry, scissoring it up.  Anyone who finds this practice innovative should consult the work of Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and Raymond Queneau.

Here are two of Foer’s vicious eviscerations:

“The demands were made more loudly, we heard him talk to God, as if begging against insistent claims” (28).

“Knot by knot he loosened himself, as unremarked as the grey heap swept into a corner waiting to be taken” (39).

SPAM poetry.

Refrigerator-magnet poetry.

The first problem with Foer’s cut-up is that he chooses the wrong object.  Knock, knock!  Schulz wrote in Polish, not in English.  What on Earth is the point of cutting up, mucking up, mashing up, and rescrambling the English translation of a Polish novel?  Polish is frightfully difficult to render into English.  If you would like evidence for this assertion, take a look at any English translation of Jan Potocki, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witold Gombrowicz.  Consider, for instance, Alastair Hamilton’s translation of Gombrowicz’s Pornografia.  Hamilton translated a French translation of the novel into English: His is the translation of a translation.

Secondly: The ingenious Bruno Schulz–a writer more gifted than Kafka, in my estimation–did not have to dazzle his readers with glistening typographies.  He let language do the work.  He let his beautiful prose speak for itself.  If Schulz’s book is the richest book Foer ever read (it is one of the richest books I’ve yet read), why disembowel all of that richness?  We know the answer: Because Foer feels condemned by the richness, threatened by the richness, punished by the richness.  Foer the Hipster, who is incapable of expressing himself inventively in writing, chainsawed the work of a great author, an author who intimidated him.  Foer’s venomous envy and hatred of Schulz are unmistakable.

Snip, snip, snip!  Pare it down!  Tear it up!  What we are left with is an absolute abomination, something far worse than a book burning.  It is one thing to immolate a great book such as “Cinnamon Shops.”  It is quite another to replace a great book with a papier-mâché dummy, an Ersatz effigy, a kitschy replica.  Nothing more malicious in the literary arts could be imagined.

In the republic of letters, Jonathan Safran Foer will be remembered as a slicer, shearer, and shredder of literature.  He is at home in a culture that is tawdry, boring, and stupid and that is becoming tawdrier, more boring, and more stupid by the day.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Postscript: STREET OF CROCODILES = *TREE* OF C*O**D**ES

*

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41: