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Loading... The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clayby Michael Chabon
  
» 70 more Favourite Books (262) Magic Realism (33) Top Five Books of 2013 (302) 100 New Classics (1) Hidden Classics (2) Favorite Long Books (51) Fiction For Men (4) Top Five Books of 2014 (333) Top Five Books of 2015 (234) Jewish Literature (15) 2000s decade (14) Historical Fiction (183) 20th Century Literature (356) A Novel Cure (113) Books Read in 2017 (1,584) Holocaust (26) jewish themed novels (11) War Stories (22) Best LGBT Fiction (50) Urban Fiction (3) Five star books (514) A Winter's Tale (20) Books Read in 2004 (78) 5 Best 5 Years (2) Best Friends Forever (71) Books tagged favorites (268) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (233) Art of Reading (88) Unread books (943)  phantomswife | Jul 6, 2018 |  Escaping from the Nazis, leaving his family and the world of magic in Prague, Josef Kavalier enters the new world of the comic book with his Brooklyn cousin and temporary bedmate, Sammy Clay. Together they create an incredible character, THE ESCAPIST. I loved this perfect book and Josef until he allowed his loyal and loving one-eyed dog to be murdered. No way. He would have searched for a better solution even if it involved skinning dead men. He would never again be responsible for the death of another innocent. (  ) m.belljackson | Jun 1, 2018 | I really liked this novel. It's sort of quiet, and sad, and ends with tentative hope. Sam and Joe are both interesting characters who go through signficant changes as life knocks them around a bit. I've been mulling over who in this duo is the hero and who is the sidekick (since the concept of sidekicks is important in the novel), and I can't quite decide. I think Joe and Sam trade off in this regard; they father each other, and they look up to each other. It's an interesting dynamic. I expected a novel that was bigger, brighter, more WOW! and THWACK! and SWOOSH! This isn't a comic book, though. This is about the minds behind the comics, the people who aspire to touch readers with art and story. At the end, it felt like the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay may just be beginning. ( ) ThePortPorts | Apr 30, 2018 | A little long winded, a little rambling, a little unrealistic, and a little depressing. (  ) atomoton | Apr 25, 2018 | This is an excellent book! Joe Kavalier has made his way to the U.S. via a daring escape and hopes to bring the rest of his family as soon as he earns the money. His cousin Sam Clay, a New Yorker born and raised, is always looking for a way to make it big. The two together strike upon The Escapist, a comic book character who can fight the fights Joe wants to fight and can earn both men money. Through the war years and into the fifties, the lives of these two men are entangled in business and personal ways. Ultimately, this is a story of family and making the best of what you have. Every event it drawn beautifully, every character comes to life in Chabon's hands. The story has hope and humor and fear and heartache aplenty. Chabon is a new author to me but I hope to read more of his work - this example is wonderful! (  ) glade1 | Jan 8, 2018 |
 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.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0312282990, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:16:51 -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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The story is very complicated and takes several unexpected turns. At times, Chabon digresses into other stories, stories written for the imaginary comic books being created by his characters. At times, the story itself takes a left hand turn when you are expecting a right and it throws you across the car seat and makes you wish you had buckled your safety belt. For the most part, it is fun and interesting.
I wanted to feel more personally connected to the characters than I did, but they often seemed to be cutouts from a cartoon strip themselves. I did feel for the overall situation in which Josef found himself. Who would not feel a genuine sadness for anyone who might find himself separated from family, helpless to save those left behind, and waiting to hear the most horrible details of their fate. How does one celebrate life or success, knowing that everyone you knew and loved has been stripped of everything that they have achieved or loved in their own lives? For the reader, knowing what happened in reality to the Jews of Prague, it did not take much imagination to know what fate awaited Josef’s family or how miraculous his own escape was.
The book might be a little long. There are probably 100 words that could be cut and never missed. I didn’t object, though, because the story was fast-paced and active for the most part, and without any feeling of being bogged down. I would read Chabon again. He exceeded my expectations.
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