Forgot to mention yesterday that I was reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close pretty much at the same time as Ms Martin's novel. I'm assuming that we're meant to think of Foer's main narrator Oskar as somewhere around the high end of the spectrum of autism, so there was something of an overlap involved in my reading.
I found Foer's novel an interesting read with much to admire in its sheer energy, but I don't think it came close to being as convincing or moving as the story for children. I'm quite certain that Mr Foer is a very clever chap, but the cleverness overwhelms, eventually becoming tiresome. I suppose all fiction is contrived in some sense, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close managed to be extremely and incredibly so.
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