The Synesthesiac

Author: Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

by Jonathan Safran Foer
Review by Maddie Oatman

In "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer creates a remarkably convincing portrayal of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, a slightly annoying, lovable and insatiably curious boy dealing with life after losing his father to the collapse of the Twin Towers on Sep. 11, 2001. Treading the line between the tender and the bizarre, Foer's novel captures a wide range of characters with indelible precision and compassion. His novel contemplates grief while never being overly morose, and is told through the eyes of a child dealing with adult matters. By incorporating photographs and manipulating conventional textual aesthetics, Foer also reinvents the form of his novel, so our understanding is based not only on his persuasive renderings of people but on the dynamic and unusual style with which he portrays their thoughts and experiences.

Oskar spends his days dreaming up peculiar yet practical inventions, memorizing encyclopedic factoids wearing only white, and exhausting the adults in his life with a perpetual barrage of questions regarding the hows and whys of his Manhattanite existence. Oskar's breathless narrative voice realistically depicts the meandering mind of a hyper nine-year-old - "I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep," Oskar excitedly thinks, "or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of 'Yellow Submarine,' which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'être, which is a French expression that I know."

After finding a set of clues he thinks may lead him to more information about his father, Oskar embarks on a journey through New York City, meeting a host of eccentric individuals along the way. Foer intersperses this journey with letters and flashbacks from Oskar's grandparents who, after fleeing Europe, are dealing with their own grief and renewal. The text may seem choppy and fragmentary to the less adventurous reader, but it is all part of Foer's postmodernist strategy of incorporating multimedia in an imaginative and very contemporary story. Written in 2005, it was also one of the first novels to deal directly with 9/11. Foer does not shy away from the emotional intensity of the subject, and yet his multi-dimensional novel is not overly sentimental, but provides a refreshing and rewarding read

"Grendel"

by John Gardner
Review by Ashley Gamell

You're probably familiar with "Beowulf," that bloody classic of early English Literature. However, you may not have read John Gardner's parallel 1971 novel "Grendel," and you should. This modern riff on the Old English story has become a modern classic of nearly equal proportions. Re-writing the "Beowulf" myth nearly 1,000 years after the original, Gardner tells the tale from the perspective of the ultimate anti-hero. Grendel, the main character and narrator of the novel, is a man-eating monster renowned in literary history for disemboweling the good citizens of Hrothgar's medieval kingdom.

In line with his choice of protagonist, Gardner's book is deliciously outrageous and utterly refined. The author dishes out throaty, stinging mouthfuls of consonants in keeping with the English language's Germanic roots. Daily monster life becomes alliterative and elegant - even Grendel's most gory banter is expressed with sensitivity, wit and style.

"She tasted of urine and spleen, which made me spit," says the title character on consuming an old woman. "Sweet mulch for yellow blooms. Such are the tiresome memories of a shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world's weird wall."

Gardner's prose is also brimming with philosophy - the parable includes a nihilist Dragon and several confused theologians. In the hallowed tradition of writers writing about writing, Grendel is concerned with the way words shape the world. He is repulsed by his oafish mother, who has lost her command of language, and fascinated by the harpist and storyteller of the human realm. In fact, for a man-eater, Grendel is surprisingly obsessed with human affairs. We wonder if he is a monster at all.

With the help of Gardner's delightfully casual characterizations, we see that the heroes and beasts of Beowulf are not so different from ourselves. Grendel himself could be any one of us on a surly day - "'Why can't these creatures discover a little dignity?' I ask the sky. The sky says nothing, predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick." Gardner, like his protagonist, is often reckless and incensed. The result is a mix of brutality and brilliance, a man-eating monster of a novel.

Synesthesiac's Summer Reading List:

"Nightwood," Djuna Barnes

"The Beauty of the Husband," Anne Carson

"The Body Artist." Don DeLillo

"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Annie Dillard

"Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard," Isak Dinesen

"Unaccustomed Earth," Jhumpa Lahiri

"The Time-Traveler's Wife," Audrey Niffenegger

"Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," Suketu Mehta

"Sputnik Sweetheart," Haruki Murakami

"Everything that Rises Must Converge," Flannery O'Conner