The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay |  | Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Picador
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  627 reviews
Sales Rank: 1185
Media: Paperback
Pages: 656
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 6 x 1.5
ISBN: 0312282990
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780312282998
ASIN: 0312282990
Publication Date: August 25, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
Winner of 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 AwardJoe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City.His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America - the comic book.Drawing on their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.With exhilarating style and grace, Michael Chabon tells an unforgettable story about American romance and possibility.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 627
 Brilliant October 18, 2009
William Alexander (Spartanburg, SC)
I have only this to say. I finished the book last week, and I have started it again.
I genuinely like Michael Chabon, although I admit I do not dash off to the bookshop when he has a new book in the stacks. But in "Kavalier & Clay," he has achieved something special, weaving traditional, well-worn themes like love and loss, family, faith, human dignity, and artistic vision and desire into an overall compelling tale with familiar yet delicately nuanced characters. I found myself backtracking a great deal, not because I was lost or confused, but because I found it joyful to find those "small connections" he makes throughout the book which make the various subplots as compelling as the main story. It's a beguiling puzzle-box of a book. I wish to say more, but I am afraid of "spoiling" the pleasure of it! And it's all set in locales that, through Chabon's descriptive power, are so familiar but belonging to another time, yet made accessible to a modern reader. I could "feel" the New York of the 1930's, the grimy comic book sweatshops, the clothing and speech patterns of the day. I was amazed, even at points, enthralled.
I note that some reviewers complain about the language, the "purple prose," the extensive vocabulary deployed. I do not understand these criticisms. While I too thoroughly enjoy writers like Hemingway and admire how he and his generation could convey so much by saying so little, I do not see how he, just to name one example, became the "exemplar of all that's holy" in American writing. And that of itself is not a criticism, just an observation. To play the apologist, I suppose I would say that sometimes lavish prose is needed to narrate a lavish backdrop and equally lavish personalities. A "Hemingway-esque" style would just not have fit this particular bill, in my personal opinion. And yes, this can be intimidating. But, I do not think this is literary "sin." I found the layered complexity refreshing and wonderful. And, in this book, Chabon actually subtley changes his style depending on what he is writing about, using language he finds fit to illuminate a given scene. This, to me, is the mark of a master storyteller.
But, I did notice that one negative reviewer, in comparing this book to "Wonder Boys," said, in so many words, "Does Michael Chabon have to have a gay writer in all of his books?" I did have to laugh out loud at that delightfully pithy observation. And I agree that perhaps he has mined that vein enough, although I do not find Chabon's characters of any persuasion to ever be formulaic, stereoyped, or - worst of all - dull. This is not a writer who has a stable of "stock" characters.
It's a masterful work from a very, very talented and erudite man. I recommend it with great enthusiasm.
Mrs.A's favorite student October 2, 2009
Teen reviewer Mrs.A,F
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" is a fantastic novel. The chemistry between two cousins who come from different parts of the world is fantastic. Michael Chabon is a very accomplished author, who's diction is portrayed in every perfectly constructed sentence.
the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay October 1, 2009
Lois E. Wilkinson (Castro Valley, Ca)
I read this book and loved it. A history of comics in NYC and jewish life in europe and NYC the late 30's through the 40's. Great book.I bought this book for a Jewish friend. I know he will love it.
Not a Booker Winning Style of Novel September 27, 2009
Richard Pittman (Toronto, ON Canada)
Kavalier and Clay is not a deep, moving, ponderous novel that wins Booker prizes. It is also not a typical Pulitzer Prize winner. It's difficult to explain what it is in some ways. Probably the best thing I can compare it to is a Quentin Tarantino film. I can picture Tarantino directing the film version of Kavalier and Clay.
The novel has at it's heart the comic book boom of the 1940s. Surrounding this is a plot that reads like a very well written comic.
It starts in Prague in the late 30s when a young Jewish man named Josef Kavalier trains to become an escape artist in the tradition of Harry Houdini. Magic and escape are major themes throughout the book. It follows his escape from Prague and arrival in New York. Ultimately he teams up with his cousin Sammy to create many successful comics where the superheroes are particularly hard on Hitler and the Nazis. The emergence of the comic as a popular form is told lovingly and in great detail.
There are many dimensions to the novel as it deals with WWII, loss of family, censorship, love, homosexuality in the 40s and 50s, radio, Antarctica, father son relationships, revenge and redemption.
It's not necessarily the deepest novel ever but it's exciting, fast moving and enjoyable. The author captured the atmosphere of the time perfectly. I loved it!
Like watching an old movie September 22, 2009
Telcomguy (Dallas, TX)
I didn't live in the thirty's or forty's, but I did watch a lot of movies from that time. Whether intentional or not, Chabon did a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere and dialog of those old movies. He very creatively blurred reality and his imaginary world in a way that was truly entertaining. Nazis, Jewish folklore, World War II, homosexuality, comic books, old time radio, magicians, the Empire State Building -- definitely an amazing adventure.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 627
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