When Oskar Schnell's father is killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the nine-year-old sets out to solve the mystery of a key he finds in his father's wardrobe. Intertwined in his story are the stories of the grandmother he adores and the grandfather who disappeared forty years earlier.
I wanted to love this book. I thought it would be beautiful and heartbreaking, and it could have been. An act of terrorism seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy? A story about a little boy mourning for his father and learning to let him go? That's powerful stuff right there. Add in the stories of his grandparents, caught up in the bombings of Dresden, and you have yourself a novel that illustrates how war wastes youth and potential. Instead, it was frustrating and pretentious and difficult to read. Oskar Schnell is the worst sort of hipster trapped in a nine-year-old's body. He's a vegan. He plays the tambourine. He makes jewellery in his spare time and talks to his grandmother over a shortwave radio. The plot is as thin as a tissue paper and full of holes which are papered over by random images, including several pages of numbers which have absolutely no relevance to what's going on. And that's the other thing. Nothing happens in this book, apart from Oskar being cutesy and precocious and people leaving things unsaid.
I know many people love this book. Perhaps I'm just too literal to get it. Perhaps it's meant to be read in hour-long sessions in coffee shops. There were times when I welled up and the story hit me right in the feels, but too often these moments were lost, buried beneath layers of achingly pretentious crap. Strip away all that, lay the story out in its bare bones, and, for me, you would have had a much more powerful, haunting and beautiful story.
Read On: I may give Coer's first book, Everything is Illuminated, a miss if it's written like this one. A better story with a child narrator is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.
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