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Ten-year-old Oskar Schell is one of those amazingly endearing and incredibly affecting characters who stays with you long after the book is done. He, along with his grandparents, serves as narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer's eagerly anticipated follow-up to EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. Oskar's favorite pastimes include spotting grammatical errors in the New York Times and participating in elaborate scavenger hunts organized by his attorney father, Eli.
Sadly, Eli was killed in the World Trade Center on September 11th. Before the tower he was in collapsed, he managed to place several calls to his family --- Oskar overheard the last call but was too petrified to answer the phone. He never told his mother about the messages because he was far too ashamed of his cowardice and he felt certain that it would be too upsetting for her.
After his father's death, Oskar discovers a vase in his parents' closet with a key hidden inside an envelope with the word "black" written on it. Convinced this is a clue left behind by his father, he sets about trying to solve the mystery and begins by contacting everyone in the Manhattan phone book with the surname "Black."
Oskar's story is intercut with the story of his grandparents --- his father's parents. He is very close to his grandmother but he never knew his grandfather, a mute who communicated by using a book where he would scribble words and phrases. He left his grandmother years ago as the firebombing of Dresden tore their worlds apart. Their story weaves its way into the modern-day narrative and coincides with Oskar's search to find out more about his father.
An ambitious and moving novel, Safran Foer uses eclectic and sometimes disturbing photographs (several images are of a body falling from the World Trade Center), word images and even blank pages to punctuate his message of a family's love and loss. Much like the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, the reader is endeared to the character of Oskar, with his mixture of odd maturity and sweet innocence. Among the first wave of post 9-11 fiction, Safran Foer bravely branches out stylistically while cleverly weaving the stories of two families' grief into an effective and moving novel.
--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller
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