OK, I JUST finished the book. Maybe 2 minutes ago. Hope that doesn't make my thoughts/comments premature, but I guess there's always the roundtable discussion to look forward to.
Like Tom, I felt extremely ambivalent about the book. Throughout the process of my reading, I felt at different times like it was one of the more courageous and accomplished novels I'd read in a long time, and at other times that Foer was a total hack, and at other times that the novel was extremely self-aware and pretentious, and at other times that it was refreshingly messy and naive. In the end, I feel that all of these are probably accurate at some level. I read an interview in which Foer says he wrote the book in a matter of weeks and edited it for years. That made me think he probably had a really great novel to begin with, and at some point decided he was going to make a masterpiece, at which point the novel became overdone and just good. What I mean is that I felt like there was a lot of good in the book, but also a lot of forced symbolism and themes. The fact that Tom was able to point out such a host of themes, but none of us probably could make sense of half of them tells me quite a bit about how far-reaching Foer's ambition was, and how flawed the outcome became. But, for a 20-year old first-time author, Bravo!
In my opinion, the over-arching theme of the book has to me life versus death, and Foer's inability to distinguish between the two. This factors into almost any work of art that is Holocaust-related, because how else can one account for the murder of millions upon millions of Jewish people, resulting the birth of a (prophetic) nation? In my oh-so-biased opinion, the only answer to this is God, but because the book itself, and all the characters in the book, resist belief in God, they are left with a meaningless search through fiction and made-up history and man-made tradition, looking for meaning to life, which ends up only leading to the opposite of truth, which is death. This God-less searching for meaning and identity is the string that begins being an opportunity to remember and ends up being a spider-web that doesn't mean anything. Sir Francis Schaeffer, anyone? :)
In response to Tom's thoughts, I think this theme is what the bread is all about - a picture of life versus death, or life through death. Jesus used the same symbolism when he calls himself the bread of life, that must be broken in his death. The 2 houses-in 1 symbolism is also extremely prevalent in Judaism, with the division of the House of Israel into the house of Judah and the house of Ephraim. The two are still connected, but are lost in a maze (like the house in the book) until they find each other... The prominent 20th-century Rebbe Schneerson told his followers they don't need to be looking for Messiah, they need to be looking for the House of Ephraim, because Ephraim will tell the Jewish people (Judah) who Messiah is. Overanalysis? Maybe so, like I said I just finished the book...
In response to Aaron's thoughts, I agree that most of the sex in the book was totally gratuitous. To me it is another example of something meant for life being used only to try to cope with death. And Foer is probably pretty sexually broken. I mean, he's fantasizing at length about his grandfather's (imagined) kinky sex life. In this same interview I read, the journalist asked Foer how much he used the internet, and Foer said all the time, several hours a day. The interviewer asked what for, and Foer said only e-mail and porn, honestly. I thought that was pretty interesting...
All right, I'll shut up.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment