Took me sadly disappointed

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" focuses on the American trauma since Pearl Harbor, namely 9/11. The father of the little Oscar came to the towers, and Oscar and his family now have to learn to live with the tragic loss. It also Oskars German grandparents have become the victim of a similar severe trauma, ie the night of bombing of Dresden. Both grandmother and grandfather suffer from this terrible experience in her youth, and grandfather Thomas shows many consequences of trauma (no longer speaks and leaves his pregnant wife sitting). Up into the psyche of his son and even his grandson Oskar, the foothills of the Dresden-trauma hit by - both son and grandson, I felt at best eccentric, even the little Oskar, long before the loss of his father. So I was able to three-person narrators (Oskar, grandmother and grandfather) hardly approximate. I felt they did succeed bizarre and quirky shown, but I did not like the three - and so I could not approach her misfortune only abstract with the heart. Every now and then I felt the novel such as the implementation of a textbook on psychological trauma and its consequences, but this is what has me even further away from the protagonists and their suffering.

The most convincing therefore were the minor characters, especially the old Mr Black, who accompanies Oskar months on his quest through New York, and of course Oskar's mother for me. Her figure looked most consistent to me, and her way of dealing with the loss of her husband, was poignant and credible. That she ekes out an existence only at the very edge in the novel, is understandable because their undramatic prudence does not fit with the dramatic theme of a Dresden-9/11-double shock together.

From the plot ago I was ready to follow Oskars months of Quest to every Black from the phone book. Where I had a lot more problems, was the history of the grandparents. I am rather disturbed the clichéd Gutmenschentum their parents who thought of course a Jew hiding, and that bothered me Thomas Schell's return to Dresden. His time in the DDR is for Foer novel wholly irrelevant (Thomas Schell would also be able to return to Fiji or in the Gobi Desert), and I'm probably the only one who has wondered how it has worked well in the GDR, when English had tattoos on his palms.

The novel seemed to me prätenziös; Trauma Trauma Trauma and American upper trauma Tragic Tragic flowed for me from each set. That the trauma trauma is then doubled with Dresden, then I was just too much (even though it may have perhaps actually given in such cases).

I was Foer novel disappointed. 2 stars.

PS: The unabridged audio book in the English original is read well, especially the two male voices that I liked.