Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, New York Library Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Los Angeles Times Book AwardJoe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City.His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America - the comic book.Drawing on their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.With exhilarating style and grace, Michael Chabon tells an unforgettable story about American romance and possibility.
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Kavalier and Clay book condition:
This book was in excellent condition (still is) when it came in the mail. No markings, tears, folds, etc.; looked brand new.
Amazing Book...:
This is the third Chabon book I have read. I have previously read The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Final Solution. I enjoyed both of these books but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a masterpiece. The characters, the setting and the storytelling is marvelous. Integration of witty humor is great, so nicely written that you enjoy every page and soon it becomes a page turner. If you want an epic story, humor together with harsh reality, strong and interesting characters and a moving... more info
Moving and Exhilarating:
It is 1939, and Josef Kavalier, a young Jewish man trained in magic and as an escape artist, has just fled Prague. The Nazis are closing in and his family is trapped, but they are able to send Joe to New York, to his cousin Sammy's family. When Sammy finds out that Joe is not only a talented magician, but is also a trained artist, he feels his dreams have come true. Sammy works as a minor artist for a company that sells novelties, but he's just glimpsed the future, in the form of the early Superman... more info
Overrated and badly structured.:
Can't believe all the hype about this book, I pretty much hated it, and yes, I did read it through cover to cover. I was uninvolved with the characters and thought that the plot was weirdly passive and totally uninteresting. Some dramatic scenes were built up to and then flunked - performed offstage, like cheap or dated theatre that is not able to show the action. This is understandable for theatre, but this is a book, FGS, where you can do anything if you have the ability. Clearly Chabon does not.
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