Jonathan Safran Foer. (2016). Here I Am: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jonathan Safran Foer. 2016. Here I Am: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Jonathan Safran Foer. Here I Am: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

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A monumental novel from the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am
In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others'? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel in eleven years—a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home—and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.
Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer's most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer's stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.

"Dazzling . . . A profound novel about the claims of identity, history, family, and the burdens of a broken world." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Dwight Garner, The New York Times
   • content:

     "[Here I Am is] an ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Here I Am consistently lit up my pleasure centers . . . This is also Mr. Foer's best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Lev Grossman, Time
   • content: "Here I Am is one of those books, like Middlemarch, or for that matter Gone Girl, which 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, and your place in it."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Daniel Menaker, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Brilliant, always original . . . Certain set pieces . . show a masterly sense of timing and structure and deep feeling . . . Foer strews small, semiprecious comic and gnomic gems all along the trail he is breaking . . Here I Am is not only the novel's title but also, maybe, an announcement of its ambitious and crazy-talented author's literary residence--an announcement that not only his location but his basic sensibility and very identity are to be found in this work."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 27, 2016
     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. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2016
     Family and what it means to be Jewish, subjects of infinite complexity, are novelist Foer's preoccupation and inspiration. In his first novel in 11 yearsa far longer, edgier, and more caustically funny tale than Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)he choreographs the disintegration of the once blissfully close marriage of architect Julia and TV writer Jacob, exploring how their changing relationship affects their three sons (so cannily portrayed), especially the eldest, Sam, who escapes whenever possible into a virtual alternative world, Other Life. Foer has enhanced his mastery of rapidly volleying dialogue and churning inner monologues and raised them to torrential proportions as the Blochs of Washington, D.C., relentlessly analyze and argue about every feeling, thought, occurrence, and action with Talmudic exactitude. By mining elements of his life to construct the many-chambered domestic tale, Foer achieves the ringing clarity of authenticity. But for all his focus on familial intricacy (including attachment to an aging dog), intellectual musings, rogue eroticism, and various neuroses, Foer is also grappling with the larger forces of anti-Semitism and war. The novel's provocative title is taken from Genesis. When God thunders, Abraham! Abraham declares, Here I am. He is present and obedient; he will even sacrifice his son. This total commitment is anathema to Foer's argumentative, fiercely inquisitive American characters, recalcitrance amplified when Jacob's Israeli cousins, Tamir and his younger son, Barak, come to visit, catalyzing a running comparison between cushy American Jewish lives and the rigors of battle-ready Israelis. This contrast is further intensified when a major earthquake strikes the Jewish state, emboldening its enemies to attack. What are Jacob and Julia's duties to the Jewish homeland? To their family and to themselves? As Sam contemplates Abraham's predicament in preparation for his bar mitzvah, he thinks, it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity. Foer's voluminous (verging on overblown), polyphonic, and boldly comedic tale of one family's quandaries astutely and forthrightly confronts humankind's capacity for the ludicrous and the profound, cruelty and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 5, 2016
     Foer’s novel requires a very talented narrator—and it got one. The prose is fast, forceful, funny, and friendly, and actor Fliakos handles it all superbly. He distinguishes children of different ages as well as fathers, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. He catches the nuances and emotional intricacies of each character’s thoughts and conversations, while his diction is perfect but not intrusive. He’s especially good at highlighting the gentle humor and major absurdities of the novel. The only difficulty for the listener is that Foer constantly raises thought-provoking questions about the meaning of friendship, marriage, family, country, religion, happiness, and angst, forcing the listener to stop the audio from time to time to mull over these issues. Listeners will find themselves hitting the pause button to think things through, but will remain eager to resume Fliakos’s wonderful performance. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 1, 2016
     

     In Genesis, Abraham answered "Here I am" both when God demanded the sacrifice of Isaac and when Isaac asked why they had brought no animal to the altar, and here are Jacob, Julia, and their three sons, faced with awful, cross-purpose choices as they try to bridge the gap between what they have and what they want. Foer's first novel in 11 years; look for Foer at LJ's Day of Dialog.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2016
     

     In Foer's first novel in 11 years (after Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), Julia and Jacob Bloch's marriage, once buoyed by the determination always to act with purpose, has been worn thin by a slow withholding and the demands of daily life. Jacob writes ruefully for television, steel-spined Julia is fed up with his timidity, and now son Sam has been accused by the rabbi of writing a list of offensive epithets. As Jacob insists that his son couldn't have done it and Julia retorts that Sam must apologize, it's not just Sam's upcoming bar mitzvah that is threatened. The Blochs' marriage is on a collision course, powerfully framed by reference to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which makes this richly conceived work more than another tale of marital woe. As Sam himself explains, Abraham answered "Here I am" when God demanded the sacrifice of Isaac and when Isaac asked why they had brought no animal to the altar, with Abraham showing a willingness to be fully present for both in a way that Sam's own parents had failed to show him when he was accused of hate speech. Inattention is its own bad move, and as we see throughout, as when Jacob's Israeli cousin scrambles as the Middle East explodes, "not to have a choice is also a choice." VERDICT Rigorous questions within an accessible story; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/16.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A monumental novel from the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am
In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others'? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel in eleven years—a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and...

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