Darrerament l’atzar m’està portant a enfrontar-me amb grans llibres. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”, de Michael Chabon, és una gesta literària, un triomf de la lletra sobre els sentits i un assalt a la percepció en tots els fronts i en tota regla. La prosa de’n Michael Chabon és exhuberant i intuïtiva, capaç de trobar metàfores sorprenents i exactes i imatges espontànies i naturals. Balancejant-se continuament a la fina línia que separa el virtuosisme de l’artificiositat, en Chabon ha escrit una novel·la ambiciosa que aconsegueix capturar l’efecte del pas del temps en l’evolució d’uns personatges plens de vida i interesants. És un exemple d’argument ben planificat i ben dosificat, explicat en tercera persona, en un estil lliure indirecte potent i tirant al barroquisme i un colorisme pulp que alterna amb uns diàlegs vivaços deliciosos que només a un tram promitjada la novel·la perd una mica de gas, per recuperar-lo sense problemes més endavant.Gran novel·la. Extremadament satisfactòria. Sovint exagero, però passarà a formar part de la història de la literatura. ( )

Just. Gorgeous. In. Every. Way. ( )

Joe Kavalier escapes Poland as the Nazis invade. He arrives in the US and partners with his cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic book heroes. In this expansive novel, the boys become men, finding and losing loves, struggling with the harsh realities of the war, and ultimately coming to terms with themselves.

This was not a fast read for me. Chabon's pace is measured as he creates the world about which he writes. (I found this true of the last Chabon book that I read - [Summerland] - as well.) But I never considered not continuing the journey with him. I felt like I came to know Joe and Sammy, and I trusted Chabon to tell me their story. Even when the plot twists might have led me to question other authors, Chabon managed to pull them off.

I was also impressed with Chabon's ability to weave so many threads together seamlessly. Other authors might hope to write a book about one of the subjects covered here - the comic book era, World War II, young loves, lost loves - but Chabon writes a book that is about all of these things. And he does it in a way that seems natural, almost easy. I highly recommend this book. ( )

I couldn't get into this book, and abandoned it.

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon (published in 2000) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001. It’s the wonderful story of Josef Kavalier who has escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 and came to live with his 17-year old cousin Sam Klayman in Brooklyn. Joe is a talented artist and Sam (assuming the name Clay) a writer of adventure stories. Together they invent an anti-fascist superhero called the Escapist and have success in the burgeoning comic book industry. Joe also is a magician and was trained as an escape artist in the tradition of Harry Houdini by Bernard Kornblum in Prague. Kornblum smuggled Josef out of Europe in a casket containing the Prague golem dressed in the suit of a pituitary giant who was a patient of Joe’s physician father (conveniently an endocrinologist). In Jewish folklore, a golem is a living figure created from inanimate matter (in Prague, using clay from the banks of the Vltava River) that protects Jews from anti-Semitic attacks.

Early on, Joe and Sam are at a friend’s apartment and glimpse a beautiful girl (Rosa Saks) escaping down the stairwell dressed in nothing but a man’s overcoat. Later, at a party in Greenwich Village, Joe rescues the surrealist painter Salvatore Dali from an underwater experiment gone awry, and Rosa invites him upstairs to see her paintings. The two fall in love. Sam walks in just as they are kissing and Rosa asks Joe if Sam is a “fairy.” Rosa is the inspiration for another superhero of Kavalier and Clay, namely the Luna Moth. Tracy Bacon is an openly gay actor portraying the Escapist on the radio and comes to dinner at the apartment of Sam and his mother Ethel. A moment passes between Sam and his mother indicating that she also suspects that he is gay. Later, Bacon brings dinner to Sam at the Empire State Building, and they kiss for the first time just before lightning strikes the building. Tracy gets 4 tickets to the opening of Orson Welles’ movie “Citizen Kane” in 1941, and Orson Welles remarks that the Escapist is “great stuff.” Joe sometimes performs as a magician (“The Amazing Cavalieri”) at bar mitzvahs and there is a passage where the role of magic in the world is discussed:

“The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”

While performing at a bar mitzvah, Joe gets the news that the ship carrying his little brother Tommy from Europe to the US has been sunk by a U-boat. Joe “escapes” and runs off to joins the Navy, hoping to kill some Germans. He leaves Rosa pregnant, and she and Sam enter a “marriage of convenience” to raise the baby who is named Thomas after Joe’s lost brother. There is a strange interlude in the Antarctic where Joe is stationed and comes face-to-face with a German geologist stationed nearby. Joe has tracked him down with intent to kill. The German fires first and wounds Joe, but then Joe sees the German as just another human being and attempts to throw his own gun away. Mistaking the gesture, the German jumps Joe and is fatally wounded as the gun goes off. Joe is discharged from the Navy and secretly finds his way back to New York where he takes up residence in the Empire State Building. He gets to know his son Tommy at a local magic shop where the two hang out. Tommy becomes aware of Joe’s intent to perform a stunt jumping off the Empire State Building and alerts the authorities by a letter to the editor of the NY Herald Tribune. Joe is only injured in the stunt. Meanwhile, Sam is subpoenaed to testify before the Kefauver senate hearings on the role of comics in juvenile delinquency (1954). The golem arrives (along with a lot of comics and other artifacts of the comic book era) for Joe at Sam and Rosa’s house. Tommy opens the box with the golem and sees that it has been reduced to dust. At the end of the book, Sam has decided to leave New York for Los Angeles while Tommy remains in the care of his biological parents.

Kavalier and Clay is a great novel about the rise of the comic book age in the shadow of Nazism and World War II. You don’t have to be a fan of comic books to enjoy this story, which has much to say about love and loss and the power of friendship. The duo of Kavalier and Clay evokes other great Jewish comic book teams such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (creators of Superman) and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. In the last line of the afterword to the book, Chabon expresses his indebtedness “in this and everything else I’ve ever written” to the late Jack Kirby. ( )