Salman Rushdie called it ‘ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all … extremely moving’ influential New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani described it as ‘cloying’. Ending in a flipbook showing a figure falling from the Twin Towers – or ascending, depending how one decides to flip the pages – it also divided opinion. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is narrated by a 9-year-old boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. The praise wasn’t universal, with the book also facing charges of preciousness and factual inaccuracy. Hailed by The Times as a ‘work of genius’ after which ‘things will never be the same’, it won the Guardian First Book award and was – unfortunately, disastrously – made into a film starring Elijah Wood in 2005. Originating in a creative writing thesis written under the guidance of Joyce Carol Oates when he was an undergraduate at Princeton, it tells the story of one Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew in search of the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) commanded a $500,000 advance and was released when its author was barely 25.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |