The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel - Hardcover

Chabon, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679450041 ISBN 13: 9780679450047

Publisher: Random House USA Inc, 2000

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay.

A "towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book" (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon's "magnum opus" (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America's finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award - Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly

About this title

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, even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages lurid 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 equaliser 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 epicentre of comics' golden age.

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 ageing 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 of a world gone completely mad. --Mary Park, Amazon.com

Review:

Praise for the novels of Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys

"Mr. Chabon is that rare thing, an intelligent lyrical writer."--The New York Times Book Review

"The young star of American letters . . . a writer not only of rare skill and wit but of self-evident and immensely appealing generosity."--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"Wonder Boys caught me up and carried me along like some kind of flying carpet. . . . Michael Chabon keeps us wide awake and reading."--Alan Cheuse,
All Things Considered, NPR

"[A] beguiling and wickedly smart novel."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Werewolves in Their Youth

"A loving craftsman and the author of superb, seemingly alchemically rendered sentences, Chabon has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling, fiction."--Michael Carroll, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679450041
• ISBN 13: 9780679450047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 656