Here I Am
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the bestselling author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything is Illuminated and We are the Weather - a rich and moving novel about modern family lives and the ties that bind
'Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read' The Times
'A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives' Evening Standard
'Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family' Time
'Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry' Scotland on Sunday
Jacob and Julia Bloch are about to be tested . . .
By Jacob's grandfather, who won't go quietly into a retirement home.
By the family reunion, that everyone is dreading.
By their son's heroic attempts to get expelled.
And by the sexting affair that will rock their marriage.
A typical modern American family, the Blochs cling together even as they are torn apart. Which is when catastrophe decides to strike . . .
Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, playfulness and compassion, Here I Am is a great American family novel for our times, an unmissable read for fans of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, a masterpiece about how we live now.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Like one of those elaborate engravings on a grain of sand, Jonathan Safran Foer’s much anticipated third novel is a marvel. It charts the breakdown of a marriage alongside cataclysmic developments in the Middle East, exploring hefty issues of Jewish identity, emotional dysfunction, communication and miscommunication. But Here I Am is so much warmer and so much funnier than that sounds—Safran Foer’s dialogue is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud, and his portraits of adolescence and parenting are a shot to the heart. It’s a long book, but it flies by.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Great-grandfather Isaac Bloch's voice opens Foer's intensely imagined and richly rewarding novel. What follows is a teeming saga of members of the patriarch's family: Isaac's son, Irv, a xenophobic, self-righteous defender of Israel who claims that "the world will always hate Jews"; his grandson, Jacob, achingly aware that his decade-plus marriage to Julia is breaking down; and Jacob and Julia's son Sam, whose imminent bar mitzvah may be cancelled if he doesn't apologize for the obscene material discovered in his desk at Hebrew school. The Blochs are distinctively upper-middle-class American in their needs, aspirations, and place in the 21st century. Foer excels in rendering domestic conversation: the banter and quips, the anger and recrimination, and Jacob and Julia's deeply felt guilt that their divorce will damage their three sons. Things are bad enough in the Bloch family when world events intervene: a major earthquake levels the Middle East, spreading catastrophic damage among the Arab states and Israel. In an imaginative segment, Foer depicts the reaction of the media when Israel ceases helping its Arab neighbors to save its own people and the Arab states unite and prepare for attack. The irony is evident: Irv, the fearmonger, has been proven correct. Foer (Everything Is Illuminated) fuses these complex strands with his never-wavering hand. Throughout, his dark wit drops in zingers of dialogue, leavening his melancholy assessments of the loneliness of human relationships and a world riven by ethnic hatred. He poses several thorny moral questions, among them how to have religious faith in the modern world, and what American Jews' responsibilities are toward Israel. That he can provide such a redemptive denouement, at once poignant, inspirational, and compassionate, is the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer.
