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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

by Michael Chabon

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9,368185132 (4.25)221
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Fourth Estate (2001), Paperback, 656 pages

Member:gyokusai
Collections:Your libraryRating:
Tags:American Mainstream ∧ Misc, American Literature
20th century (55) american (173) american literature (90) chabon (41) comics (693) coming of age (42) contemporary (53) contemporary fiction (69) fiction (1,685) gay (47) golem (66) historical (43) historical fiction (181) holocaust (83) homosexuality (51) jewish (152) Jews (57) judaism (65) literature (94) magic (46) New York (224) New York City (90) novel (255) own (73) Pulitzer Prize (391) read (174) superhero (126) tbr (64) unread (98) WWII (240)
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English (183)  French (1)  Swedish (1)  All languages (185)
Showing 1-5 of 183 (next | show all)
About as awesome as everyone says it is. ( )
  jobbi | Feb 7, 2010 |
Finishing this book was a real achievement for me! I started it three times before I got hooked on the characters of Joe and Sammy. The ending was flat and a lot of the story felt forced, but, on the whole, it held together. ( )
  debnance | Jan 29, 2010 |
It took me a long time to read this book, I had to take a break in the middle because it was all just too intense. It's brilliant, I loved it, it made me laugh, it made me cry, and like all the best novels (not that I can think of many others right this moment, so obsessed am I with this one) it filled up a little place inside me that I didn't even know was empty. ( )
1 vote joellalibrarything | Jan 28, 2010 |
An astonishing product of a deep love of Golden Age comics, Central European Judaism and US immigrant Jewry. This is an entirely satisfying examination of the nature of identity and origins. ( )
  TheoClarke | Jan 24, 2010 |
Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was a nostalgic look into the heyday of comics and the devastating reality of WWII when superheroes were out there fighting the bad guys in the pages of funny books and on soils far from home. Love and loss weave a tale towards, if not a joyful ending, at least towards a hopeful one.

Mr. Chabon hit about every hot button topic he could and showed that these are still themes that are debated and fought for and against to this day--homosexuality, war, abortion to name a few. The story had a very Mad Men feeling to the time and settings.

I enjoyed the book, but I'm thinking people who have a real interest in WWII and a love and fondness for comic books will especially find a home in its pages. ( )
  DanaJean | Jan 17, 2010 |
Showing 1-5 of 183 (next | show all)
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.
added by ty1997 | editsalon.com, Amy Benfer (Sep 28, 2000)
 
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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Epigraph
We have this history of impossible solutions for insoluble problems
--Will Eisner, in conversation
Wonderful escape!
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield"
Dedication
To my father
First words
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
Quotations
"We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place."
"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."
It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world - the reality - that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (2)

Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Book description
The novel follows the lives of the title characters, a Czech artist named Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born writer named Sam Clay—both Jewish—before, during, and after World War II. Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the nascent comics industry during its "Golden Age."

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 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:00:31 -0500)

(see all 2 descriptions)

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