Here I Am
A Novel
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Buy for $24.74
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Narrated by:
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Ari Fliakos
A monumental new audiobook 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 and critics 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 the most important writers in America.
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Critic reviews
"[Ari] Fliakos masterfully weaves the multiple perspectives (and many accents, including Israeli and Iranian)...into a cohesive and powerful audiobook." AudioFile Magazine
"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." Publishers Weekly
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Bold, baggy, and beautiful
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Mainly for Jewish americans
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One of the things I like about his writing is that there's both an eloquence and a simplicity to the style and meter. There are turns of phrase that are so simply eloquent and universal that you can't help but feel the story, rather than just intellectually absorb it, which is one of the reasons I like his writing.
The story was fictional when it was written about a war in Israel and the Middle East. It included elements of the earthquake as just one element of the story, but listening to it during the week when it was actually happening, a version of it (the real version) came out. It was both surprising and haunting, and it allowed me to think about what was really going on in the world through a voice of something that had been imagined as possible rather than as a reporting of what was actual.
It was very interesting to me that the emotions around it and the language around it came, even though imagined and projected into a future that did not actually exist. It was so on the nose and appropriate to thinking about the emotions of what's going on in the world around us today.
One thing about the style of the writing makes me feel like I'm sitting in a room as part of the story rather than being above and outside, watching or detachedly observing the story. It often feels as if you're eavesdropping in the middle of a conversation that is happening in the story, a silent participant rather than an outside observer. I highly recommend this book. The performance of the audiobook was also excellent and enjoyable.
A timely story about being a human being
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Gifted writer and well performed
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The books does a fantastic job of describing and exploring martial and familiar relationships.
There some subplots which were a distraction and did not drive the plot line, but being merely filer.
Wonderful book
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