Book of the Month: Here I Am (Jonathan Saffron Foer)

The title of Jonathan Safron Foer’s 2016 novel, his first in a decade, is taken from the Book of Genesis. “Here I am,” is what Abraham tells God after God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The imputations of Abraham’s cryptic response are explored by Foer in the context of his novel’s gifted, if ultimately flawed, protagonist Jacob Bloch.

Jacob Bloch belongs to the third generation of Jewish diaspora, after his grandfather Isaac left the horrors of Europe behind and built a life for him and his family in America, starting as a shop-keeper. Jacob, a secular Jew, is a successful, if creatively frustrated, television screen writer. He has written a prize winning novel years ago, but, for several years he has been hacking out the screenplay of a popular sitcom, which, while it ensures the steady flow of income that supports the comfortable life-style in Washington DC, leaves him feeling creatively unfulfilled. Jacob lives with his wife Julia, and three (smart, precocious and, for these reasons, irritating) sons—Sam, Max and Benjy. Julia is an architect, successful like Jacob, and (like Jacob) is creatively unsatisfied, not having built anything yet. Jacob’s father Irv has turned into a provocative media blogger who has a special talent for detecting anti-Semitism (Europe has become a Jew-hating continent (when was it not?); French are ‘spineless vaginas’ who would shade no tears over the disappearance of the Jewish people; and Germans were the only true European friends of the Jews, but they were  bound to run out of their ‘guilt and lampshade’ one day) and whose preferred solution to deal with any anti-Israel sentiment is to take out the offender to an open field and napalm. As the novel opens we learn that Isaac, nearly hundred, is about to be shipped off to a care home as he is finding it increasingly hazardous to live on his own. Isaac wants to die but is postponing his death (as if it is in his gift) until the Bar Mitzva of his eldest great-grandson, Sam. Sam, who is growing into a surly and opinionated teenager, is in trouble at school having written offensive and racist words in his book (including the N word, which is totally unacceptable), a charge he persistently and tenaciously rejects. Julia does not believe him, but Jacob does. Here the reader gets the first inkling that all might not be well with the Blochs. And the readr is right: the mid-life snafu arrives.  The crisis in the Blochs’ marriage arrives over the most trite, yet the most devastating, of matters. Julia discovers texts Jacob has sent to a work colleague which makes you wonder whether the talented television script writer wasn’t moonlighting as a script writer for porn industry. Julia believes Jacob’s submission that although he and the woman exchanged salacious texts, nothing happened between them (she knows he would lack the guts), but that is not enough for her to stay in the marriage which has been losing its shine. Julia may have many good qualities, but forgiving marital infidelity, even though only in texts, is not one of them. As Jacob's marriage implodes and descends into the predictable pettiness, resentment, and self-pity (expressed, however, in scrupulously polite manner and language, the estranged partners being in agreement that they must keep up the front of reasonableness and moderateness for the sake of children), another crisis arrives in their lives which poses serious questions to Jacob about his Jewish identity in the pluralistic American society and its freedom: the destruction of Israel (Foer rather dramatically opens his novel with the sentence that informs the reader of this calamitous occurrence). The dramatic worsening of Arab-Israeli relations (if that were possible) following an earthquake, the ensuing mother of all wars between Israel and practically the whole of the Muslim world, and the threat to the very existence of Israel form the second strand of the novel. Jacob has a cousin (once removed) in Israel; he is the grandson of Isaac’s brother who decades earlier decided to migrate to Israel. Jacob’s Israeli cousin (as the cousin, Timir, is frequently referred to in the novel), is a confident, brazen-faced, assertive man who has achieved financial success doing business and deals that do not get covered in the pages of Financial Times. Timir (like Jacob) has got his leg over on occasions over the years, but (unlike Jacob) he is smart enough not to have got caught. Jacob has a complicated—loving but tense—relationship with Timir. Timir arrives in the USA with his middle son just before the Arab-Israeli war breaks out. Goaded by Timir (who informs Jacob that he does not have enough real problems), and perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to send a message to Julia, Jacob decides to go to Israel in response to an emotional appeal made by the Israeli prime-minister to the Jewish diaspora to return to the motherland in her fight for survival (a rare instance of hysteria in the novel, worthy to be in a Philip Roth novel). Julia does not stop Jacob (Julia’s depiction in the novel is a tad unsympathetic: she is a somewhat cold and distant figure who is bored with Jacob and takes the opportunity offered by Jacob’s inappropriate texts to end the marriage and start relationship with the father of Sam’s friend) and (predictably) this moment of heroism (or insanity) does not last. As this sprawling novel ends, the reader is left (or is meant to be left) grappling the questions of identity, relationships, and human existence.

Here I Am is (relatively) more straightforward in its structure compared with Everything is Illuminated, Foer’s debut novel (my most favourite). The novel has many sub-plots which appear to play hide and seek with the reader; they disappear for a while, only to appear briefly again when you are not expecting them. These digressions and subplots can be a bit confusing at times, and give a fragmented feel to the novel (I don’t know whether that was deliberate). Foer’s tendency to switch between formats (combined with chronological dislocation of the narrative) can be exhausting for the reader. Long passages of texts (bristling, I have to say, with incisive observations and mordant humour) alternate with long passages of stichomythia—so long in fact that the reader must go over the dialogues more than once to understand which statement is said by which character. As one can expect from a Foer novel, there are passages of great wit and verbal acrobatics notwithstanding occasional cross-over from irreverence to puerility. There are bravura set-pieces in the novel, and comic one-liners abound; but, for all that there are also passages which are long-winded where Foer seems to try too hard to be quaint.

Here I Am is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man in the modern world, Jewish or not. I read that there are many autobiographical elements in Foer’s novel (he was married to Nicole Krauss for ten years before the couple separated in 2014). Even if you did not know that, in Jacob Bloch Foer has created a protagonist in whose foibles—his neediness and self-absorption, his solipsism—as well as qualities (sensibilities, inherent decency) many men would see a reflection of themselves. Perhaps there is also a message somewhere in it: it is the heroics and not the sensibilities that will get you through life. That is a great strength of this not-perfect novel.

Books Read in 2018

 Below is a list of books I managed to finish reading in 2018.

1. The Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)
2. The Train (Georges Simenon)
3. The Next Best Thing (Anita Brookner)
4. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
5. The Infatuations (Javier Marias)
6. Sing Unburied Sing (Jesmyn Ward)
7. The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller)
8. For Two Thousand Years (Mihail Sebastian)
9. Hospital Babylon (Emogen Edward Jones)
10. Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
11. Lucky Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)
12. Unity (Michael Arditti)
13. Party (Elizabeth Day)
14. It Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis)
15. His Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)
16. The Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)
17. The Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)
18. In the Café of Lost Youth (Patrick Modanio)
19. A Strangeness in My Mind (Orhan Pamuk)
20. The End of Eddy (Edouard Louis)
21. Birdcage Walk (Helen Dunmore)
22. Bright Precious Days (Jay McINerney)
23. Tell Tale (Jeffrey Archer)
24. Swing time (Zadie Smith)
25. Breaking Cover (Stella Rimmington)
26. Adrian Mole and the Prostate Years (Sue Townsend)
27. Love and Fame (Susie Boyt)
28. 4321 (Paul Auster)
29. Frankenstein (Mary Shelly)

 Non-Fiction

1. For Who(m) the Bell Tolls (David Marsh)
2. Horrible Words (Rebecca Gowers)
3. I Maybot (John Crace)
4. I Partridge (Steve Coogan)
5. Life in Question (Jeremy Paxman)
6. A year in Provence (Peter Myale)
7. When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Calanithi)

A dishearteningly low number of 36 books in the year, way below my target of a book a week. But I guess these things are relative. A colleague was telling me the other day about her new year’s resolutions (without the slightest interest on my part; I had not initiated this conversation). There was the usual list of improving fitness and joining a gym (which, I suspected, were her resolutions every year—this woman on a treadmill is like a hamster on a wheel; peddling furiously but going nowhere, weight is still piling on), and I was about to think of an excuse to bring this boring exchange to a swift end, when she mentioned, “And I am going to read lots more books this year.” “How many?” I asked. “Eight, at least,” she said.

The year started on a disappointing note. I began reading King of Pain, which was on my Kindle for many years, described as a dark, sharp and funny novel, '2012’s most enjoyable read', according to a bloke called Neil Genzlinger who wrote in the New York Times about it. I can’t now remember why I did not or could not finish the novel. I must not have found it all that sharp or funny. I remember halting reading the book and making a mental note to return to it sometime later in the year, but never did. Maybe I shall give it another go this year.

This is another thing about the books I read in 2018. As I went through the list of books I read, I was astonished to learn that I had read Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. I have no memory of reading this book. I therefore read some of the reviews on the Internet to see whether that would jog up my memory. Nope. And this is, according to Taiye Selasi, the author of Ghana Must Go (another novel I have been meaning to read but have not got around to do it yet), Smith’s finest novel. Should I read it again? On reflection, perhaps not. If the novel failed to leave any trace on my mind, there is no point in reading it again. I do like Zadie Smith, though. I shall wait for her sixth novel, which, Selasi might conclude, is even better than the fifth, and therefore the finest.

2018 ended, too, on a boring note. I had to read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. This book was chosen by the book club of which I am a member. 2018, a member of the book club informed us, trembling with excitement, was the two hundredth’s anniversary of the first publication of this “iconic novel”. “We must read it,” he ordered. Either people did not have the courage to disagree with him or they were as excited as he was about the two hundredth’s anniversary. At just over 160 pages, Frankenstein is not an overlong book; but that did not make it any easier for me. It was painful, toiling through the stodgy prose of Mary Shelly, which sucked the life out of the story which was neither believable nor particularly interesting. OK, we are prepared to suspend our belief when we decide that we want to read a story about a monster, but some attempts at developing the plot would not have gone amiss. Everyone in the novel, be it Frankenstein, or the English dude who writes letters to his sister telling her this story, or even the monster, speaks in the same manner and style: wordy and long-winded. Nothing that happens is not met with a commentary that goes on for several paragraphs. This novel epitomised for me everything I dislike about the nineteenth century novels. Tedious does not even come close to describe it. The only discovery I made (not having watched any of the Hollywood films), is that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of his creator.

I re-read Lucky Jim and The Bell Jar, two books chosen by the book club.

I had read Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis’s debut novel, years ago, and remember enjoying it thoroughly. Reading it second time round, after many years, was still enjoyable; but the novel seemed a bit dated, and some of the set-pieces in the novel, such as when Jim, in a drunken haze, damages the guest room in his mentor’s house and, upon waking up the next day, ineptly tries to cover the misdemeanour (of which he has little recollection), goes on just a tad too long and ceases to be funny. Luck Jim, I decided, after my second reading of it, is an excellent novel; but not the novel I would recommend you should start with if you have not read any of Kingsley Amis’s novels. I would suggest Jakes’ Thing or Stanley and his Women, Biographer’s Moustache or One Fat Englishman. All of these novels are funnier and more biting satires than Lucky Jim, I think. Read these novels first. Then read Lucky Jim.

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American poetess Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in less than a month of the publication of the novel which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It is an autobiographical novel which describes a period in the life of a young woman, who experiences a breakdown of some kind and keeps on harming herself or making attempts on her life. She gets admitted to asylums where she is given the electric treatment. The electric treatment does not work the first time but does the second time. It is an absorbing tale in the same way watching live coverage of a car crash is absorbing: you are appalled but can’t shift your gaze away from the screen. The title, ‘Bell Jar’ is apt in conveying the sense of feeling of claustrophobia and being trapped experienced by the narrator. It must be excruciating to be trapped in the troubling thoughts inside your head, from which there is no respite.

Unity was the first novel I read of the British novelist Michael Arditti. The prose of Unity is elegant and assured. Arditti cleverly mixes historical facts with fictional events in the novel in which life characters mingle with fictional characters. Unity was a pleasure to read. I think, I shall read more novels of this novelist.

Occasionally you read a novel, which, when you finish it, you are glad you read. The Underground Railroad, the American author Colson Whitehead’s novel, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (as also the 2016 National Book Award for fiction) was one such novel. It is an extremely well-researched novel. It is Whitehead’s skill that he does not parade the breadth and depth of the research that must have gone into writing the novel. Thrilling, as Barak Obama described it.

Lionel Shriver was another author whom I read for the first time in 2018. The Mandibles, first published in 2016, is set in near future—America between 2029 to 2047. The novel tells the story of its eponymous family, four generations of it. The novel is slightly slow to take off, but, once it does, absorbs you utterly. Shriver has a great feel for the human foibles and pretentions, which she throws into relief with great relish. The Mandibles is a biting satire and has many comic scenes (maybe I was imagining it, but I thought Shriver's prose style and the wry asides which appear regularly in the novel, were similar to the style of Barbara Kingsolver), but ultimately it is a sombre commentary on how quickly values and behaviours disintegrate when money disappears.

Anita Brookner is a favourite writer. Not the easiest of writers to read, but I have never found her novels to be anything less than superb. The protagonist of The Next Big Thing, a 73-year old German émigré called Julius Herz, is in many ways, like the protagonists of many other Brookner novels. He is intelligent, a recluse, and has a special talent for torturing himself with analysis and re-analysis and, when he is finished with it, some more analysis, of everything. Like most of Brookner’s novels, The Next Big Thing proceeds at a glacial pace and nothing much happens. That is, in my view, the beauty of it. Brookner’s novels, like a good whiskey, are not to be gulped down in a hurry. You must savour them slowly.

I decided to read It Can’t Happen Here, the 1930s novel of Sinclair Lewis (the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), because a year or so ago it was promoted in many bookshops in the UK as the novel that predicted Donald Trump. Many years ago, I’d read Babbit, one of Sinclair’s most famous novels, and although I don’t now remember much of it, I remember liking it. I can imagine why those who are opposed to the Trump Presidency would see the echoes of what they think is currently going on in America (not good) in the protagonist of It Can’t Happen Here, Burzelius (Buzz) Windrip, a populist politician who becomes America’s president on the backdrop of the Great Depression in the 1930s. But there, really, is no comparison, I think, between the America depicted in Sinclair’s novel and the twenty-first century America under Trump. Sinclair’s language is direct and straightforward, and he does not much care for crafting exquisite sentences (I thought). He is more interested in the message he is giving; and he gives it with the force of an HK-27 Cyclops. The novel is satirical at times, but later turns into a direct (and not wholly convincing) description of the struggle between the liberal values and tyrannical dictatorship, which, whatever you might think of Trump and America, isn’t America of today.

Another Nobel prize winner I read in 2018 was Patrick Modanio. His short novel, In the Café of Lost Youth (title of the novel taken from a quote by the French philosopher and Marxist theorist Guy Debord) is in four parts, each part narrated by a different narrator. Each has known a young woman called Louki, who has mysteriously disappeared. This is a strange and atmospheric novel, melancholic in its tone, which depicts the Bohemian world of the 1950’s Paris (the period of the novel is not clarified, but I thought the novel was set in the 1950s)—languid, but also brooding and slightly sinister—extremely well.

Orhan Pamuk was the third Nobel Laureate I read in 2018. His 734-page novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, is not a novel, it would be fair to point out, that can be read in one sitting. It is an absorbing family saga, but it is also a loving chronicle of a city. I have never been to Istanbul; however, after reading A Strangeness in My Mind, it seems like a magical city.

Paul Auster’s enigmatically titled, 4 3 2 1, is, at more than thousand pages, requires even more concentration and stamina than does A strangeness in My Mind. 4 3 2 1 is the reason why I could not meet my target of fifty novels in 2018. It took me more than two months to read just this novel. What makes 4 3 2 1 a memorable read is Auster’s assured, plush, sumptuous prose (notwithstanding occasional drifts into overlong sentences, Philip Roth-style, which go on for a page at a time); his humane approach and the gentle humour. This gigantic and ambitious bildungsroman is also a commentary on an important epoch in the twentieth century America

Another novel which is suffused with an undercurrent of menace is Helen Dunmore’s last novel, Birdcage Walk. Set in Bristol, it tells the story of Lizzie Fawkes, the daughter of a radical advocate of women’s right, and who is married to a property developer. The period of the novel is French revolution, but the story takes place in Bristol. Lizzie’s step-father, Augusts is a passionate advocate of the Republican cause and is in support of the revolution. Lizzie in the meanwhile is trapped in a marriage that has hit turbulent waters because of the financial difficulties faced by her husband that are tangentially affected by the French revolution.  Birdcage Walk strikes a few false notes (in particular, the unconvincing prelude), and is probably not Dunmore’s best, but it still is a very good read.

Finally, Graeme Macrae’s His Bloody Project, which was apparently long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize a few years ago, was an unexpected and absolute joy. It is a blackly funny and fiendishly witty tale of a murder in the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century. Belter of a book.

Two of my favourite writers, Philip Roth and VS Naipaul, died in 2018. I consider Naipaul to be the greatest writer in English of his generation. I have been meaning to re-read all the novels of Naipaul for a while. I wanted to read at least a novel each of these giants of literature in 2018 but did not somehow get around to do it. Maybe this year.

As always, the non-fiction books I read were fewer than the fiction; but I liked all of them.

Below is a list of my top fiction books of 2018

1. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
2. The Train (Georges Simenon)
3. Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
4. The Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)
5. His Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)
6. The Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)
7. The Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)
8. Lucky Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)
9. Unity (Michael Arditti)
10. 4321 (Paul Auster)