Just the other day I finished re-reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I don’t even remember the last time I read it, but man, it’s the kind of thing I will always keep near me. Foer weaves three perspectives in an unconventional, poetic fashion. Both his words and the imagery in his book serve as a kind of visual art.

I found myself putting asterisks by sentences or paragraphs that I found profound or honest:

“I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”

“She wants to know if I love her, that’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself, but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”

“Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn away your head from something you do not want.”

“I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.”

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“It’s a tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.”

“‘I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I’d heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn’t see the walls through all of the paintings! They’d painted the ceilings, the plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that! Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn’t feed themselves, because they couldn’t get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!’ ‘They starved?’ ‘They fed each other! That’s the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!’”

“I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn’t be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.”

“I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep.”

“At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed. God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing. He said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was darkness.”

I could go on and on list quotes but I have to stop myself at some point. Suffice it to say, Foer is incredibly inspirational and extremely talented (ha ha). Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is uplifting yet sad, but sad in a bearable sort of way, sad in a I’m-ok-with-it-ending-like-this sort of way.

Since the film recently made its debut, I decided to watch it last night since I had some free time. Maybe this is because I tend to watch independent/art house films, but I was disappointed in the Hollywood interpretation of the novel. I understand that they faced a daunting task since this book is quite visually artistic and relies on its words rather heavily, but I did not expect them to leave out (for the most part) one of large stories that takes up half of the book. They (the vague ‘they,’ since I’m never really sure who’s in charge during this kind of thing— the screenwriter? the director?) changed Oskar’s personality into more of a loud, raging boy as if making the viewers assume it is he who is extremely loud (when really it is his thoughts and internal feelings). Adding to that, in the movie Oskar would shout out important bits of dialogue that made it difficult to understand/absorb, especially if you haven’t read the book.

They took out some incredibly (I feel like I may start over-using this adjective) poignant details that I thought would definitely find their way into the film. Since I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I will just mention one: Oskar wore a key around his neck that rested on his heart. Since the key was really cold, he put a band-aid on his heart where the key would rest. How lovely is that? Why would they change that?!

And lastly, the musical score was too obvious, which always makes me roll my eyes. Oh, is it this moment sad? I wasn’t aware of that, but thank you, Hollywood, for having an uncomfortable amount of violins shove themselves without invitation into my ears. I feel like this movie had so much potential and I really wish Focus Features or some other studio produced it instead of Warner Bros. It was a shame to see such an organic book turn into something contrived and that tried too hard (in the worst sense) to capture the heart of its audience.