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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780312282998
ISBN number: 0312282990
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 656
Printing Date: August 25, 2001
Publishing house: Picador
Sale Popularity Level: 1963
Studio: Picador
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young 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. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.
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 very first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the very 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
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Reading this book is sort of analogous to having a days-long therapy session; this is something I see as both a strength and a weakness. I don't think many people would deny Chabon's strength as a storyteller, but, like Quentin Tarantino's movies, his single-minded obsessions often come out as stronger than the characters would have realistically experienced them. Chabon is pretty good at hiding this sort of writing-as-katharsis impulse, but there are a few points in the book where you're reading about comic books, Jewish oppression, and homosexuals, and wondering if this is a book or a confessional.
As a story about two Jewish cousins who write comics, one of them a homosexual, this is a concern that runs through the length of the novel, even if the concern is a minor one.
I sometimes find myself swayed by the power of final pages and final sentences, and this book really delivered what I wanted. Satisfying, not entirely happy, not expected; strength at the same time as surrender. Chabon seems to understand the art of making near-heroes out of characters at one time both extraordinary and self-destructively passive.
Rated by buyers -
Fabulous example of what fictions does best. Reading this intelligent, highly creative novel will introduce you to a cast of characters you would never have the pleasure of meeting in "real" life and take you to times and places you couldn't otherwise experience. The humor, sincerity, and inventiveness of Chabon's writing will capture your imagination from the early pages and sustain you throughout. Even at over 600 pages, you'll be sad to say goodbye.
Rated by buyers 
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A beautiful book about Sammy and Joe, two cousins who end up writing and drawing comic books together, the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a staggering tale of dedication, commitment, human frailty, perseverance, loyalty, and the many faces of the most powerful of all super powers, love. it shows the power of the love and appreciation of art, the power of family, the power of ethnicity, and the power of dreams. There is a riff early in Kavalier and Clay in which Sammy throws out ideas for heroes that is a hilarious send-up of super powers. Chabon knows that Sammy knows from the beginning that he has the power of his dreams, the power of his loyalty, and ultimately the power of love that will carry him through adversity to find happiness. Joe on the other hand must face the unimaginably grim reality of leaving everyone he loves behind to face the Nazi horrors. There is never a mystery about what Joe's loved ones face, and we feel along with him the guilt of his finding new people to love in the America of the mid-20th Century, a place of amazing opportunity and amazing charlatans. Chabon destroys the idea of nostalgia by exposing some societal norms that border on the Nazism that the characters set out to fight, each in his own way. The book is set in a particular time and Chabon does not glamorize that time, just portrays it honestly.
Normally I view the Pulitzer Prize as an enormous badge of mediocrity. Look how many books chosen for it have fallen from fashion, never to darken the door of literature beyond their meager days in the sun. Yet with Kavalier and Clay the pretentious puffer fish of the Pulitzer Prize committee plucked a plum. This novel will stand because of Chabon's marvelous wordcraft, and the most super of all powers.
Rated by buyers 
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I like the writing in this book. I like the characters in it. It took me to a different time and place. The characters are rich and complex. I cannot, however, recommend this book. It has many sub-stories within its main storyline. Many of them are never resolved. They just fade away. The book zig-zags all of the place. I finished four-fifths of the book and gave up. I got tired of twists and turns that ended nowhere.
Rated by buyers -
Kavalier and Clay are Jewish cousins, Clay (morphed from Klayman) a short New Yorker crippled by polio, Kavalier a tall brooding escapee from Europe just before Hitler locked the gates and opened the extermination lines. The day after Kavalier's surprising arrival in New York, after his amazing escape from Europe via Japan and San Francisco, Sam and Joe launch the multi-million dollar earning Escapist comic book line in a combination of daring, talent, and brinksmanship bluffing.
The rest of the book is the story of how they survive sucess and conquer failure. The book reads quickly, with only an uncomfortable homosexuality subplot to ruin the enjoyment of the interaction between the cousins and the bubbling potboiling excitement of the early days of comic books in the 1930 and 1940s.
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