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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Paperback)
by Michael Chabon
| Category:
Genre fiction, Comic, Action & Adventure, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An interesting tale illuminating many aspects of human nature in all its foibles, this book will satisfy lovers of fine prose as well as adventurous and historical minded readers. |
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Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Picador
Pub. in: August, 2001
ISBN: 0312282990
Pages: 656
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00990
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0312282998
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- Awards & Credential -
Winner of Pulitzer Prize, 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 Award. Also a bestseller on Amazon.com in Lietrature and Fiction category. |
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- MSL Picks -
This is an epic novel of grand proportions which addresses many issues in the human experience. Joe is a teenage Jewish refugee from Nazi occupied Prague. He teams up with his fatherless American cousin Joe to create the comic book character "The Escapist" during the golden age of comic books. Joe is the artist who draws the complex graphic images and Sam Clay writes the story line. Joe is increasingly frustrated in his attempts to save the rest of his family and especially his younger brother from extinction under the Nazis. The Escapist character becomes his alter ego in the fight against Germany. Where Joe fails the Escapist with his super powers suceeds. This novel is a complex work of fiction deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. Yet it is a page turner. I could not put it down. This is one of the richest most complex novels I have read in a long time. It is a treasure and I was sorry when it ended. Even if you do not like comic books, you will enjoy this novel. It is about people dealing with very trying circumstances and instances of futility. The comic book industry is merely the vehicle for spinning the tale.
(MSL quote)
Target readers:
Comic novel fans and readers interested in the topic of WWII.
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Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His other books include Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.
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From Publisher
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.
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| View all 9 comments |
Donna Seaman (Booklist, MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Virtuoso Chabon takes intense delight in the practice of his art, and never has his joy been more palpable than in this funny and profound tale of exile, love, and magic. In his last novel, The Wonder Boys (1995), Chabon explored the shadow side of literary aspirations. Here he revels in the crass yet inventive and comforting world of comic-book superheroes, those masked men with mysterious powers who were born in the wake of the Great Depression and who carried their fans through the horrors of war with the guarantee that good always triumphs over evil. In a luxuriant narrative that is jubilant and purposeful, graceful and complex, hilarious and enrapturing, Chabon chronicles the fantastic adventures of two Jewish cousins, one American, one Czech. It's 1939 and Brooklynite Sammy Klayman dreams of making it big in the nascent world of comic books. Joseph Kavalier has never seen a comic book, but he is an accomplished artist versed in the "autoliberation" techniques of his hero, Harry Houdini. He effects a great (and surreal) escape from the Nazis, arrives in New York, and joins forces with Sammy. They rapidly create the Escapist, the first of many superheroes emblematic of their temperaments and predicaments, and attain phenomenal success. But Joe, tormented by guilt and grief for his lost family, abruptly joins the navy, abandoning Sammy, their work, and his lover, the marvelous artist and free spirit Rosa, who, unbeknownst to him, is carrying his child. As Chabon - equally adept at atmosphere, action, dialogue, and cultural commentary - whips up wildly imaginative escapades punctuated by schtick that rivals the best of Jewish comedians, he plumbs the depths of the human heart and celebrates the healing properties of escapism and the "genuine magic of art" with exuberance and wisdom.
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Ken Kalfus (The New York Times Book Review, MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
It would make a nice comic book series - the cousins square-jawed and ham-fisted - but the depth of Chabon's thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement. |
Gregory Baird (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Michael Chabon's spectacular, Pulitzer Prize winning, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is unlike anything else you'll find on the bookshelves of your local bookstore (or Amazon, of course). It is a quirky, unique story with an enormously talented writer whose keen eye for description and characterization make what could have been a tired plot (the rise, fall, and possible reunion of a partnership between a pair of cousins who collaborate to build a comic book empire) dazzlingly fresh and new instead. The hallmark of a great writer is that they can make the old seem new again, and Chabon is truly gifted in this regard.
The titular duo whose amazing adventures the narrative chronicles are Josef Kavalier, a former magician's apprentice who escaped Europe and the Nazis to come to the U.S. but is haunted by the family he left behind, and Sammy Clay (nee Klayman), whose talent and fierce ambition set him and his cousin on a path to success in the then new field of comic books, but whose tortured sexuality keeps him from satisfaction as he must continue to live a lie. Together they create the Escapist, a masked superhero whose story embodies all of their hopes, fears and insecurities. Sammy subconsciously relates to the Escapist's dual identity and secret life - carefully hidden behind a public persona - while Joe uses the Escapist's fictional missions to Europe to fight the Nazis that are holding his family captive (the first half of the novel takes place before Pearl Harbor spurred U.S, involvement in the war, so Joe waged war on the Nazis in the pages of his comic in the hope that it would inspire the U.S. to get involved sooner). While these "Amazing Adventures" truly shine in the novel's first half, the fact that the last half is hampered by melodramatic twists (such as Joe's Antarctic revenge scenario, a leap from the Empire State Building, etc.) is imminently forgivable because of Chabon's tight control of the plot and how it impacts his characters.
Ostensibly, Amazing Adventures is about the friendship between Joe, Sammy, and Joe's girlfriend Rosa as they make comic book history, but there is so much more. We also get themes regarding family, love, and loss that are rendered all the more poignant thanks to the novel's WWII-era setting, and the fact that Joe and Sammy garner inspiration from their own personal hopes and disappointments says a great deal about the power of fiction and where it comes from. Chabon is a fiercely talented and thorough writer (the amount of research that must have gone in to his sumptuous period details is staggering), and reading this novel is pure, unadulterated bliss. |
Ben (MSL quote), UK
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Superbly written and engrossing story about two cousins, American Samuel Klayman, and Polish refuge Josef Kavalier, who first meet as the young refuge is shoved into bed alongside his cousin. Before that happens though Josef has to engineer his escape from the Nazi threat in Poland. They grow up and establish themselves as a partnership in comics. The story is complex and meaningful, and any attempt to give a synopsis would only spoil the pleasure for the reader. That it covers a lifetime; trauma, love, devotion, loyalty, loss and sacrifice and much more should suffice.
What shines through is a most beautiful story of the developing relationship between the two cousins and Rosa, the extravagant young girl who becomes inextricably involved with the two boys. There is a beautiful air of melancholy that pervades the story at times, including circumstances that surround Sam in relation to the isolation his sexual inclinations create for him. Full of wit and humour and humanity, the writing is superb, a sheer pleasure to read. This is truly a book that cannot be recommended too highly, an absolute must read.
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