Here I Am (Foer) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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.
Daniel Menaker - New York Times Book Review


Dialogue pings, as animated as an Aaron Sorkin script, and is often, very, very funny.
Jonathan Dean - Sunday Times (UK)


"[A] startling and urgent novel.... There are scenes so sad and so funny and so wry that I texted a friend repeatedly as I was reading it, just to say "goodness me!"... [T]he soul, if you will, of this novel is not in its technique, but in its soulfulness. It is a novel about why we love and how we love and how we might stop loving. It is humane in that no character is a caricature. Foer has become the novelist we deserve.... [He has] stretched and expanded the possibilities of the novel without losing either intellectual integrity or emotional honesty. Here I Am is not just bold, it is brave.... That this book is not on the Man Booker shortlist is nothing short of a disgrace: it will be remembered when all the second-rate crime fiction and dinner party novels are long forgotten
Stuart Kelly - Scotsman (UK)


Here I Am, an epic of family and identity...offers an unflinching, tender appraisal of cultural displacement in an uncertain age.
Rebecca Swirsky - Economist (UK)


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.
Lev Grossman - Time


Foer tests his own boundaries of spirituality and sexuality, ambition and sacrifice, originality and influence, revisiting themes and techniques from his earlier books. With this novel, he is stepping up to compete for his place in literary history.... Foer rises to the rhetorical challenges of this plot, paying full attention to its comic, apocalyptic, psychological, emotional and historic possibilities. It’s an exciting, masterful performance and his energy and power of invention never flags.
Elaine Showalter - Prospect (UK)


Brilliant.... The book ends on a sorrowful and deeply poignant scene, but even the moments of pain and loss do not diminish the vital spirit, so authentically Jewish, that is the real glory of Here I Am.
Jonathan Kirsch - Jewish Journal


[Here I Am] is at once painfully honest and genuinely hilarious―and full of emotional surprises that will leave you reeling.
Elle


(Starred review.) [A] teeming saga.... [Foer's] dark wit drops in zingers of dialogue, leavening his melancholy assessments of the loneliness of human relationships and a world riven by ethnic hatred.... [A]t once poignant, inspirational, and compassionate...the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) 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.... Verdict: Rigorous questions within an accessible story; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Foer’s....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.
Booklist


[Here I Am] showcases Foer's emotional dexterity even as it takes place across a wider canvas than his previous books.... This is great stuff, written with the insight of someone who has navigated the crucible of family, who understands how small slights lead to crises, the irreconcilability of love.... Sharply observed
Kirkus Reviews