For Jonathan Safran Foer fans and sceptics alike, Here I Am comes as a wonderful gift, a truly painful, honest book which purports to be about a lot of things but is mainly about one thing: the breakdown of a marriage between a whiny, self-obsessed Jewish novelist turned scriptwriter and his blameless wife. Whether or not Foer drew inspiration for the book from the much-publicised breakdown of his own marriage to fellow novelist Nicole Krauss I have absolutely no idea and care less. Like any fully functioning adult, good fiction outgrows its origins.
Or at least it should. A large part of Here I Am concerns itself with the very question of what we owe to the past and to others. As well as being a portrait of a marriage in crisis, the book is also a family saga about the Bloch family, encompassing Jacob’s father Irv, his grandfather Isaac and his son Sam, whose pending bar mitzvah is causing Jacob and his wife Julia terrible anxieties.
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