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Loading... The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clayby Michael Chabon
  
» 52 more Top Five Books of 2013 (301) Favorite Long Books (20) War Stories (10) Top Five Books of 2014 (315) Magic Realism (58) Holocaust (21) jewish themed novels (11) A Novel Cure (69) Historical Fiction (213) Best Urban Fiction (18) 2000s decade (19) Hidden Classics (50) Winter Books (8) 5 Best 5 Years (2) 20th Century Literature (624) Books tagged favorites (243) Fiction For Men (43) Unread books (940) I just spent over 2 weeks with this book. An amazing adventure indeed! An absorbing plot and characters you FEEL. It's for sure a page turner. It's a spellbinding story set in a time frame that has held a fascination for me my entire life. Michael Chabon's writing is (ironically!) like magic. His prose...I can't find words to describe. A reviewer wrote that Chabon's sentences are so cozy they'll wrap you up and kiss you goodnight! Oh my God his writing is a pure pleasure to read. The book is set from 1939 to 1953 and travels from Prague to NYC. It's a 655 page commitment that is so well worth it. LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it. (  ) michele.juza | Feb 25, 2015 |  LOVE it! ( ) AlisonLea | Jan 10, 2015 | Jewish Joe Kavalier escapes from Prague to his relatives in America leaving his family and younger brother behind to a bleak fate under Hitler,s regime. He is a talented artist, his American cousin SAm Clay,an imaginative story teller. Both have an interest in comics and recognise the growing popularity of the superhero. For Joe it is an outlet for his guilt and anger and an opportunity to rescue his young brother. Unfortunately both boys are tormented by their personal lives and after their initial success, their following years are filled with disappointment and tragedy. The book is well written and engaging but I found it quite sad. (  ) TheWasp | Jan 3, 2015 | This is a book that's easy to see people giving up on, or getting confused by. Not that it's hard to follow, it's not. But your expectations will be played with, rewarded, and punished, at different times. Roll with it, and just enjoy. The impatient will at times be frustrated with seemingly pointless details crammed into many spaces, and I feel your pain. The rhythms of this book are like that of life, sometimes long periods are filled with tedium, other times the most meaningful or frightening moments last only a few seconds. At times I found the prose of the book simply dazzling, a word I come back to again and again when thinking about this book. One section of the book is so daring in it's execution, I know I'll keep it in mind for the rest of my life. Good sushi is a study of contrasts and complements. Several mild notes that alone amount to little, but together form a gentle, yet deeply touching experience, but just at the moment you are aware of this harmony, the acid bite of a single drop of vinegar, or the spicy slap of wasabi reminds you that a little contrast can show you what all that harmony is really for. This book, like sushi, might not be for everyone, but for those who are receptive, have a lot of "Umami" to look forward to. ( ) wjmcomposer | Nov 5, 2014 | This is a book that's easy to see people giving up on, or getting confused by. Not that it's hard to follow, it's not. But your expectations will be played with, rewarded, and punished, at different times. Roll with it, and just enjoy. The impatient will at times be frustrated with seemingly pointless details crammed into many spaces, and I feel your pain. The rhythms of this book are like that of life, sometimes long periods are filled with tedium, other times the most meaningful or frightening moments last only a few seconds. At times I found the prose of the book simply dazzling, a word I come back to again and again when thinking about this book. One section of the book is so daring in it's execution, I know I'll keep it in mind for the rest of my life. Good sushi is a study of contrasts and complements. Several mild notes that alone amount to little, but together form a gentle, yet deeply touching experience, but just at the moment you are aware of this harmony, the acid bite of a single drop of vinegar, or the spicy slap of wasabi reminds you that a little contrast can show you what all that harmony is really for. This book, like sushi, might not be for everyone, but for those who are receptive, have a lot of "Umami" to look forward to. ( ) wjmcomposer | Nov 5, 2014 |
 It's like a graphic novel inked in words and starring the author himself in the lead role: Wonder Boy. This is definitely New York, the old-school version. In the fusion of dashing young men in fresh new $12 suits, the smell of newsprint and burned coffee and laundry, and the courage to face unrelenting evil with pluck and humor, Chabon has created an important work, a version of the 20th century both thrillingly recognizable and all his own. Although suffused with tragedy, ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'' proves to be a comic epic, generously optimistic about the human struggle for personal liberation.  With ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' Mr. Chabon has fashioned a big, ripe, excitingly imaginative novel and set it in the world of his grandfather, a New York City typographer at a plant where comics were printed... In loving if sometimes windy detail, since his great book is buried inside a larger and more meandering one, the prodigiously talented author of ''Wonder Boys'' leads readers into the world of Sam and Joe's pop collaboration. Chabon is a genius --- there is no other way to describe his ability to blend Hitler, comic books, brotherhood, first love, fame and the pitfalls of celebrity, Brooklyn Jewish home life, the European struggle against the Third Reich, America's growing prosperity, and good-looking women who use their smarts and their curves to get ahead in the world together in such a cohesive, complete story.
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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
(retrieved from Amazon Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:44:41 -0400)
With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers. It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun. The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys-and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century. Annotation. With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers.… (more)
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