Extremely incredible...incredibly extreme. Yes, both.

I've just finished a truly fascinating book, surely the strangest novel I've ever encountered. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Johathan Safran Foer invokes the surreal absurdity of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: A Novel. As are these two, Foer's novel is anti-war, anti- the new war protocol we call terrorism.

You'll love it or you'll hate it. No In-between. If you can tolerate its strangeness, it's probably best to read it in as few sittings as possible. Too long between sittings and you may get lost in the shuffle between characters and their telling of the tale. Stay the course! You'll be rewarded in the end.

As for me, I loved the book and as a bonus I acquired a pithy new quote for my "Life is..." list. [See previous entry in this blog: Feb 2, 2011.]

To wit: "Life is scarier than death."

But I knew that already.

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