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3.5 

Here I Am

By Jonathan Safran Foer
Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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’sFresh Air”

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147 Reviews

3.5
“To be a modern, non-Israeli, jew is to be conflicted. Conflicted in your alliance, conflicted in your passions, and conflicted in your love. Where this novel feel short for me in many aspects pertaining to relationships, parenting, and passion, I did find that https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2617.Jonathan_Safran_Foer hit the nail on the head when articulating how it feels to be the small man in this big Christian world. At one point the main character gets annoyed with his grandfather for going on a pro-zionism rant about how no matter how hard it sucks to feel like the bad guy, the jews will always be the bad guy in everyones eyes, no matter what we do, no matter how we behave, we will perpetually be hated, so we may as well do something about it. This section brought me to tears, as these rants have been echoed in my jewish home time and time again. The allegiance to a state I have never been, as it is supposed to be my safe space, and it is constantly under fire of being destroy among me and my family rang close to home, and was expertly articulated. WITH ALL THAT BEING SAID, this book was 300 pages too long. It should have been edited down to a op-ed style memoirist piece about Foer's opinion of being a Russian jew in the modern era. It was unnecessarily vulgar, and the sex in general could have been excluded. I felt like an example of a modern jewish novel that this was attempting to be was https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880602.Fleishman_Is_in_Trouble but https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7235807.Taffy_Brodesser_Akner was much more successful in her nuances about love, and lust, and destruction of relationships.”

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