Living Backwards

Wow.

What an amazing book. How captivating, sad, and unreal it all is. Many books, articles and stories about “the worst day” (Foer) are riddled with facts, figures, sadness and politics. This is one of those truly heartwrenching stories that gets to the truth of trauma; not just as experienced during 9/11, but as experienced in all the tragedies in all the world from many different perspectives.

The ending of the book is beautiful. I thought I would feel cheated when the book ended because I never found out what was in the box that the key opened. I felt cheated that it wasn’t Thomas Schell’s key at all; it was merely an accident the key ever ended up in Oskar’s hand.  The whole book was, on the surface, about a child searching for a lock that this key would open, but even though we never find out what is inside the box that the key opens, I still feel satisfied and I feel that the book resolved itself completely.

The last few paragraphs of the book, where Oskar was “inventing” that everything could go backwards, were the most heartbreaking of them all. Every one of us has wished that, just once, we could go back to before someone close to us has died. We could tell them we loved them. We could tell them they meant everything to us. We could live differently; even tell them not to do the thing that will kill them the next day. The man would fall back up into the towers. The planes would fly away as smoke gets sucked back in. Everyone would be safe. Everyone would be loved.

We all have felt this need. It is a trauma victim’s path to always re-live their encounter, and even live the days or moments just before the event began. Oskar is a deeply traumatized boy – and his grandmother is traumatized, his grandfather, his mother – and he is surrounded by much sadness and grief. How can a child even begin to understand those things around him?

The most poignant moment for me is, after reading the backwards passage, I saw those pictures. Almost like a flip-book, each picture had the man falling back up into the tower. Oskar hoping it was his father. Oskar is trying to reverse time; to bring his father home. “Where we would be safe” (Foer 326).

Annie Kominek