Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Published 2006 · 326 pages · 89,650 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to read?
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Oskar's voice is quick, colloquial, and full of lists and invented words, but not obscure. It is closer to Beach Read in accessibility than to The Great Gatsby, with some scientific and German-inflected touches.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Oskar's short, run-on bursts and the grandfather's unpunctuated, breathless letters vary the rhythm, though the sentences stay easy to follow. The grandmother's long unbroken pages add some demand beyond 1984's plain declaratives.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Grief, silence, and the ethics of violence sit beneath concrete events such as a boy visiting strangers and a key in a vase. Ideas arrive through personal experience, as in It Ends with Us, with a thinner philosophical layer.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Photographs, lists, letters, and typographic experiments pack in plenty to notice, but the plot itself is simple. It is denser than The Housemaid but lighter than The Great Gatsby's compression.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Oskar's guilt, the secret of the answering machine messages, and the grandparents' past emerge by inference from letters and images. The reader reads between a child narrator's words, somewhat like To Kill a Mockingbird but with more fragmentation.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The key, the falling body, the YES and NO palms, and the blank pages recur and accrue meaning. The book signposts them clearly, closer to 1984's allegory than to Gatsby's green light.
- Ironic distance: 32 out of 100
- Oskar's humor and the grandparents' earnestness are mostly sincere, with some gap between what a child sees and what the reader understands. Less ironic than The Great Gatsby, more than It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- The key's lock is found and Oskar's secret is spoken, but grief stays unresolved and the flip-book ending is wishful rather than conclusive. It closes more than The Great Gatsby yet leaves emotional questions open.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Three narrators, letters, photographs, blank pages, and shifting timelines from 1945 to 2003 create a patchwork. It is more fragmented than Beach Read or 1984, though far less so than Midnight's Children.
How Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is regarded
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Dublin Literary Award 2007, shortlist