Genre Fiction
![Michael Chabon - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B00456TWZY.jpg)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York's Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author-soon to be a Showtime limited series
"It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal-smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read."-The Washington Post Book World
Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize
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.
Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award
"It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal-smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read."-The Washington Post Book World
Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize
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.
Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award
Editorial Reviews
"The depth of Chabon's thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness, and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement."-The New York Times Book Review
"I'm not sure what the exact definition of a ‘great American novel' is, but I'm pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one."-New York
"The themes are masterfully explored, leaving the book's sense of humor intact and characters so tightly developed they could walk off the page."-Newsweek
"A page-turner in the most expansive sense of the word: its gripping plot pushes readers forward. . . . Chabon is a reader's writer, with sentences so cozy they'll wrap you up and kiss you goodnight."-Chicago Tribune
"I'm not sure what the exact definition of a ‘great American novel' is, but I'm pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one."-New York
"The themes are masterfully explored, leaving the book's sense of humor intact and characters so tightly developed they could walk off the page."-Newsweek
"A page-turner in the most expansive sense of the word: its gripping plot pushes readers forward. . . . Chabon is a reader's writer, with sentences so cozy they'll wrap you up and kiss you goodnight."-Chicago Tribune
Readers Top Reviews
The Outsider
This is a wonderful read, a top notch yarn about escape and people bound by their chains. Joe Kavalier escapes from the Nazis in the coffin of the Prague Golem, and winds up in Brooklyn. He befriends his cousin Sam, and the two of them create a comic book character, the Escapist to fight the Nazis for them. Having read it over a decade ago, I did not recall all the plot points, so it was very enjoyable throughout. You can read it as a ripping yarn, an analogy for the plight of Jews during and after the war, and not worry too much about how deep it is. For me. this is Chabon's second best book, behind the recent Telegraph Avenue - which is better written, and just as entertaining. Chabon's three early books have a homosexual character and storyline, and the one is K&C is central to the plot. I am not sure why he does this, but I am glad he doesn't do it anymore. It does not detract in any way from the tale, but it is peculiar that he felt compelled to include this 'twist.' Here, it makes sense. For my money, this would make an amazing film, but it would be a long and bumpy one. Perhaps not, better as a book. If you haven't read it, you won't be disappointed, but you must be patient. It's long.
moonmothMig Bardsley
The first three quarters of this novel is excellent with elements of magic realism mixed in with a tale set in Prague and New York. I found the last quarter a bit annoying when the actions of one of the main characters seemed out of character. I also suspect that Michael Chabon didn't know how to end the story as he ties things up in a most unsatisfactory manner.
JenPSaxumKym Hamer
This story begins in 1939 in New York City. Sammy Klayman lives as an only child to a single mother, and one day his cousin from Europe - Joe Kavalier shows up at their doorstop after escaping his war torn country. He is alone and scared, and Sammy does not like that this kid is not a member of his household. Quickly, though, Sammy discovers that Joe can draw. Sammy starts to share his love of comic books, and soon he and Joe are working together making their own comic book series. They come up with their hero - the Escapist - based on Joe's past of being able to escape like Houdini. Their comics soon become extremely popular. They have their own series, their own toys, their own radio show. Joe stashes all of the money he makes away so that one day he can bring his entire family to America. Tragedy strikes, and Joe runs away. For 11 years, Sammy and Joe's girl - Rosa - search for him to no avail. It isn't until Rosa's son, Thomas, starts to disappear into New York City, skipping school, to visit a mysterious man at a local magic shop. Soon Joe is back in their lives and everything changes for he and Sammy. This book was.....okay. First of all - it was way too long. Very wordy. I found myself skimming sometimes just because there wasn't a lot of dialogue and too much explanation. It is a writing style - I get it - it just isn't for me. Second of all - I did not like Joe. His character was frustrating and extreme. There was a fairly good size chunk of this book during the part that Joe is absent that I felt could have been eliminated all together. Or at least shortened. It completely derailed the story, and didn't fit. The beginning, though, and the ending, when Sammy and Joe were together - was entertaining. Sammy is a witty character and had some great lines. He kept the story afloat and moving forward, unlike Joe's character. This book is definitely for folks who love comic books. They talk quite a bit about the comic book greats throughout this book and mix true history into the story of these fictional writers. My husband - who is a total nerd for these types of stories - is going to read it next so I will be anxious to hear his take on it.
Rick Ackerman
I'm a literary snob, and my taste runs to masterpieces from the canon of 20th Century fiction by Mann, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce and Nabokov, but also New England transcendentalists, Russian novelists, Wolfe, James and Shakespeare. I am also 70, with much less time to waste on the kind of stuff, including trash fiction, that I enjoyed at an earlier age. A friend recommended Chabon's 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union,' and I was hooked. The author is a great storyteller, a writer with a rare gift for bringing vividly to life the fascinating idiosyncrasies of human behavior that give the best fiction the ring of truth. His metaphors in particular are the freshest and most accurate I have ever come across, and even though they dazzle and surprise, you'll appreciate that Chabon is not just showing off; rather, he is simply nailing it again and again in describing the truth of small things and events that bring a novel to life. Concerning Chabon's peerless skill as a storyteller, there is a chapter in 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' that takes place at a party hosted by Salvador Dali. The occasion builds to a moment of exultation that was as affecting as any I have experienced in print. Its impact is comparable to what I've sometimes felt listening to a sublime passage from a symphony or a quartet, or watching a key scene in a great old movie. Chabon's wry sense of humor is as sharp as can be. We've all read passages in novels that caused us to laugh aloud. Chabon, however, is the only novelist I've read who made me laugh out loud a half-dozen times in the space of just two pages. He was describing a grizzled old newspaper reporter who'd returned from the boondocks after a decade's banishment. His physical appearance, manner of dress and professional background are described in a way that is reminiscent of some of the most memorable characters from Thomas Mann's final novel, 'Felix Krull, Confidence Man.' Chabon is a writer of the first rank, even when compared to the exalted likes of Mann, whose works I have read, studied and enjoyed for more than 50 years.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Part One--The Escape Artist
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. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis: It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role-of the role of his own imagination-in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. he was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition-one of a thousand-of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion-one of them, at any rate-was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay-and the true history of the Escapists birth-began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the doorframe, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived in Brooklyn tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"
"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spic...
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. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis: It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role-of the role of his own imagination-in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. he was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition-one of a thousand-of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion-one of them, at any rate-was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay-and the true history of the Escapists birth-began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the doorframe, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived in Brooklyn tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"
"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spic...
