Author Archives: EKaufman

From an interview with Foer:

“Q: How did the idea for the novel originate?

JSF:  To make a long story short, I’ve tried to follow my instincts. I’ve tried to write the book I would want to read, rather than the book I would want to write. I’ve tried never to ask if something was smart, but instead if it felt genuine. A set of themes rose to the surface: silence, invention, anxiety, naiveté, absence, the difficulty of expressing love, war… I felt I couldn’t push them down, and I chose not to try to. Voices became pronounced. Some characters became vivid, others vanished. A plot… happened. If it sounds inefficient, I’ve described it properly. I cannot imagine how I could have been less efficient. But maybe inefficiency is the point. One can use a map and drive to a destination. Or one can follow the most interesting, beautiful roads—trusting oneself, trusting the car, and trusting the logic of the pavement—and end up where you couldn’t have realized you wanted to be until you got there. Writing, for me, is about following roads. And that intuitive, wandering approach explains not only why this book is so far from where I started, but why I feel it so personally, so viscerally, and so, well, loudly and closely.”

After reading your responses so far, I feel particularly interested in how Foer categorizes his own writing process as “following roads.” I wonder if this is what makes the book a bit tricky for some of you? If you, as writers, were to follow your own roads, what would they look like?

Another excerpt from the same interview–

“Q: The form of the book is quite new, particularly the use of photography.  How did that come about?
JSF: I was browsing the Internet one night—allowing links to carry me farther and farther from the news sites I normally visit—and was shocked by the breadth and graphicness of the images I quite unintentionally came across. I don’t mean that in a naïve or prudish way. There’s something exhilarating about being so close to everything at once, something beautiful. But there’s something incredibly lonely about it, too. And ugly. It made me think about children, and the visual environment in which they are now developing. What must it be like, as a nine year old, to see beheadings, and home videos of famous actresses having sex, and dogs fighting, and babies being born, and people jumping from planes with broken parachutes? Some of the images in the novel pertain directly to Oskar’s story, but many are there to provide context to his life, and give the reader access to a different kind of sympathy. That is, the photographs show not only what Oskar’s eyes might see, they show his eyes.”

Do you think that the form of the novel matches its content? Do you feel like you are able to see what Oskar’s eyes might see?