I don’t know, but I would guess that the pain of losing someone close to you is magnified if the death occurs in a huge, very public tragedy. I’m thinking the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Grenfell Tower fire. The other obvious example is the destruction of the Twin Towers in the 9/11 atrocity in New York City. The whole calamity could easily make those left behind slightly mad. Hopefully this madness would be something you would recover from in time but if you are a young, rather autistic boy who has lost his father, then maybe this process would take longer and be more severe. This is where we are in this highly original (I do not use that word lightly) weird and rather jarring book. It is not a comfortable read although there are many moments of humour, as there tend to be in even the darkest of novels.
Oskar our 9 year old narrator and hero … and he is a hero, bless him … meets many survivors of different sorts on his journey, or maybe odyssey is a better word, looking for the lock that matches the key that belonged to his dead father. This is obviously a ridiculously impossible task but healing occurs in strange and unimaginable ways and really that is what Oskar is searching for.
This is a virtuosic book which cannot be slotted into any particular genre. It is deeply compassionate and wise. The author Jonathan Safran Foer has a most astonishing mind. It takes us to places that were before unknown.