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Here I Am

Here I Amfour-stars
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Published: August 2016
Pages: 571
Goodreads
 

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 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 spiraling conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the very meaning of home–and the fundamental question of how much life one can bear.

My Thoughts

Jonathan Safran Foer is considered, by some, to be part of the New Sincerity or Post-Postmodernism trend started by David Foster Wallace and continued by writers like Dave Eggers. Accordingly, Here I Am is written in a completely unironic style and many of its phrases walk the thin line between universal truth and Hallmark greeting card.  I can see how some readers might find this annoying, but I loved it.

For me, this was a novel about distances: the distance between who we are and who we want to be, between us and the people closest to us, between our real world and our imagined worlds, between what we say and what we mean. I loved watching the characters of this novel explore these distances and in so doing get closer to some sort of personal truth.

Quotes

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

There’s a Hasidic proverb: ‘While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.’”

The tiny distance from perfect rendered it shit.

At times, it was almost impossible to cross the distance between their bodies, to reach out. At times, it was impossible. Each knew the feeling so well, in the silence of a darkened bedroom, looking at the same ceiling: If I could open my fingers, my heart’s fingers could open. But I can’t. I want to reach across the distance, and I want to be reached. But I can’t.

Nothing could matter more. Without context, we’d all be monsters.

They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing—coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made—and farther in feeling.

But he couldn’t cross the distance that didn’t exist. The vastness of their shared life made sharing their singularity impossible. They needed a distance that wasn’t a withdrawal, but a beckoning.

Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original distance was closeness: the inability to overcome the shame of subterranean needs that no longer had a home aboveground.

Her constant judgment carved through him like a river, creating two shores.

My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity.

Let’s go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren’t going to find a way to agree, but let’s go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let’s go to bed. It’s the only bed we have. Let’s go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let’s retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

I know that I went too far in what I wrote.”

“I’m telling you, you didn’t go far enough in what you lived.”

The sum of everything she hated herself for would never surpass her knowledge that in the most important moment of her child’s life, she’d been a good mother.

The cup was half full enough.

When you didn’t look both ways, when you ran with scissors—I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so careless with the thing I most loved?

In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.

When Deborah went into labor, Irv prayed to no one that she and the baby would be safe. When Jacob was born, he prayed to no one that his son long outlive him, and acquire more knowledge and self-knowledge than him, and experience greater happiness. At Jacob’s bar mitzvah, Irv stood at the ark and said a prayer of gratitude to no one that trembled, then broke, then exploded into something so beautifully unrestrained and full-throated that he was left with no voice to deliver his speech at the party. When he and Deborah didn’t read the books they were staring at in the waiting room of George Washington Hospital, and Jacob almost pushed the doors off the hinges, his face covered in tears, his scrubs covered in blood, and did his best to form the words “You have a grandson,” Irv closed his eyes, but not to darkness, and said a prayer to no one without any content, only force. The sum of those no ones was the King of the Universe.

Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them.

And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that would otherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.

I’ve raised my voice at a human only twice in my entire life. Both times at the same human. Put differently: I’ve known only one human in my life. Put differently: I’ve allowed only one human to know me.

because understanding oneself isn’t a prerequisite for being understood.

Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don’t wrestle we let go of. Love isn’t the absence of struggle. Love is struggle.

It’s the rare parent, maybe one in a hundred, probably fewer, who is able to watch her blind child approach an intersection and not grab his arm. It’s with love that they’re holding him back from danger, but they’re also holding him back from sight. When I teach children to ride bikes, there are inevitably crashes, just as there are with sighted children. But parents of blind children almost always take it as proof that too much is being asked of their child, and they step in to protect him. The more the parents want their children to see, the less possible they make it, because that love gets in the way.’

“‘How were you able to overcome that and learn?’

“‘My father left before I was born, and my mother had three jobs. The absence of love allowed me to see.’”

Whatever the conditions of your life, you’re never going to be happy if you use the word unfair as often as you do.

Their relationship was defined not by what they could share, but what they couldn’t. Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.

Life is precious, and I live in the world.

four-stars

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthousethree-stars
by Virginia Woolf
Published: 1927
Pages: 172
Goodreads
 

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.

My Thoughts

OK, I know this is a great classic, but what can I say? I just couldn’t get into it. I really enjoyed Mrs. Dalloway, but this was a painful slog that I only completed out of some masochistic, misplaced sense of not leaving things unfinished. It started out well, but the more I read, the more I felt trapped in a tar pit. I am aware the failing is mine, and perhaps I will try again at a later date. For now, I am just glad to be done. Ugh.

Quotes

…any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests.

It seemed to her such nonsense – inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that The real differences, she thought, studying by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough.

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Miata’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

I am sure there were more worthwhile quotes, but I stopped underlining.

three-stars

Historia oficial del amor

Historia oficial del amorfour-half-stars
by Ricardo Silva Romero
Published: 2016
Pages: 540
Goodreads
 

"voy a contar hacia atrás la historia de mi familia. Voy a narrar al revés su destino, su karma y su suerte. Voy a describir el crimen de 1976, el duelo de 1935, y todas las persecuciones que nos han hecho sentir condenados en Colombia, pero después de relatar la noche de 1989 en la que por poco nos salvamos de la muerte"

My Thoughts

Life got in the way and it took me a long time to finish this book, but I am really glad I came back to it and read until the end. As the title states, this book is a love story, but not in the traditional sense. Although the author is emphatic about the romantic love he feels for his wife, the love he focuses on is the one shared by his immediate family: his mother, his farther, his brother and himself.

The author begins at the end, reassuring us that the story has a happy ending and that he is going to start there and work his way back. He begins with a day in the present, and working his way backwards chronologically, picking out days relevant to his family’s history and sharing them with us, thus giving us glimpses at his family’s life and at the same time allowing us to feel the deep love that binds them together.

Everything he narrates is true, but reconstructed through the art of fiction. In this manner, he shares with us not only intimate details about his family’s life, but also defining moments in the history of Colombia. This blending of fact and fiction allows his writing to achieve an urgency and immediacy that are difficult to find in straight, historical accounts. His chapter, for example, describing the day the M-19 took over the Palace of Justice, grabbed me from the first word and did not let me go until the last.

For me, the weakest part of the book occurs when the book moves far enough back in time that the author is no longer the narrative voice, as he has not been born yet in the chronology of the book. From that point on, the narrative voice moves between a few different characters and I felt it lost some of its coherence and urgency as a result. Happily, the author narrator returns at the end and provides a satisfying finale.

I definitely enjoyed reading this book and am looking forward to reading more by Ricardo Silva Romero.

Quotes

…la vida es esperar pacientemente que los amores de uno le sonrían.

Nadie tiene la última palabra sobre si mismo.

Tengo unos papás tan buenos que parecen hijos, y me siguen dando una vida infinitamente mejor de las que les dieron a ellos, y yo, apreciado Dios, no tengo excusa. No me deje fallar, sin embargo, no me deje perderme ni tratarlo de tú. Concédame, Dios, este libro que no es mal para nadie; concédame, Dios, este relato que no va a olvidar ni va a mentir ni va a ser miserable, y ha tenido la decencia de empezar por su final feliz.

…la gente que uno quiere no se crea ni se destruye, sino que se transforma, y el tiempo no existe.

…hemos estado juntos en esto y en lo otro, y en el colegio y en las vacaciones, y en ese mundo y esa mitología que sólo entienden quienes han tenido los mismos papás. Yo no sabía esto de mi: que mi hermano no era una persona allá afuera que se podía ir, sino que yo lo cargaba por dentro.

Este año no ha sido nada fácil ser hermano de mi hermano.

Ay Dios, Dios de la crucecita que tengo en mi mesa de noche, yo no puedo amarlo a usted sobre todas las cosas – como me piden a primera hora en el jardín infantil – porque a estos tres sí los conozco en persona y los quiero mucho más.

¿y si el amor no es sólo un accidente, sino, más bien, una disciplina y un empeño?

No es la historia sino su narrador quien decide un final feliz. Todo drama es susceptible de ser una tragedia, un comprobación brutal e incontestable de que nada tenemos en las manos y todo pasa por algo y para algo, pero también puede probarnos que sabemos reescribir, parodiar, celebrar, volver ficción lo que nos ha estado pasando y hemos sido; todo drama puede ser asimismo, mejor dicho, una forma de la compasión, una comedia.

four-half-stars
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