Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2330 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
'His almost ecstatically smart and sassy new novel!Chabon is a spectacular writer![and] is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words!Chabon's ornate prose makes [Raymond] Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain!He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.' Guardian 'He is the most wonderful vaudeville performer.' Philip Hensher, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Michael Chabon's brilliant new novel starts with a bang!It hums with humour. It buzzes with gags!Superb images also team in this long novel: the accumulated reading experience is one of admiration, close to awe, at the vigour of Chabon's imagination!a hilarious, antic whirl of a novel.' Sunday Times 'A divine gumshoe romp.' Sam Leith, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Chabon has written such a dazzling, individual, hyperconfident novel that it's tough to work out who wouldn't have fun reading it. If the thriller plot doesn't get you (and it's easily the equal of any detective story in the past five years) then the exuberant style and the sackfuls of great jokes will! Whichever way you cut it, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is pure narrative pleasure, high-class stuff from cover to cover. Only a shmendrik would pass it up.' Independent on Sunday 'A first rate noir novel always works on the premise that everyone has secrets; that we all apply veneers in our dealings with others, and that guilt is an omnipresent force in human interaction. "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" certainly plays by these rules!Chabon has brilliant fun with his Jewish-Alaska construct and its cultural disconnections. Besides being a fantastic crash-course in Yiddishisms, the novel never sins against its own splendidly absurd conceit by becoming overtly showy or pleased with its considerable brilliance.' The Times 'Chabon is masterly at evoking reality through smells and rises to the challenge of differentiating his "black hat" (Orthodox) characters with precise descriptions of beards.' Observer 'It's Raymond Chandler meets Speilberg's "Munich", via Haruki Murakami.' Time Out 'The treasure in this book is the energy, wit, language and sheer intelligent joyful invention.' Jon Riley, in Esquire 'Books of the Year' 'Mr. Chabon's latest novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", builds upon the achievement of "Kavalier & Clay", creating a completely fictional world that is as persuasively detailed as his re-creation of 1940s New York in that earlier book, even as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe!authoritatively and minutely imagined!Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka -- its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and Byzantine political and sectarian divisions -- that the reader comes to take its existence for granted.' The Scotsman 'Chabon displays great skill in knitting together the disparate elements of his invented milieu!' Independent 'It makes film noir look like film blanc by comparison.' Arena 'It's a breathtakingly good novel, with a serious purpose behind the pastiche fun, and confirms Chabon as one of the most exciting writers of his generation.' Scotland on Sunday 'His talent is undisputable. Chabon's novels are warm, witty, a little whimsical, always beautifully written. He is that rare and precious beast: a literary writer with crossover appeal and a proper engagement with the demotic!Funny, touching and compelling, the novel transcends the limitations of all its genres -- which is pretty much Chabon's MO!a stunning achievement.' GQ 'Chabon has taken flak in the past from US critics aghast that someone who has so much literary weight can be so entertaining. If so, the talent he shows in this ambitious tale will have them burning his effigy in every branch of Borders.' Sunday Telegraph '"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is an enjoyable confection, written with wit and panache!Chabon's ear for cadence and his eye for details are lovingly acute!little is superfluous in this page turner!it entertains and moves, even astounds.' Times Literary Supplement 'A highly original detective thriller.' Financial Times 'The joy of this book is in the writing. Chabon creates a distinctive world and mood, Jewish noir, full of melancholy and loss but also buzzing with wisecracks and attitude.' The Jewish Chronicle 'This is a master storyteller at work, a stylish noir-esque murder mystery interwoven with pathos, wit, and the grasp of descriptive metaphor that make one swallow hard to keep from shouting with joy. Michael Chabon illuminates and invites discussion while his meticulous plotting and scintillating characters create an alternate world that compels belief!confirms Chabon's status as one of the truly great living American writers.' Waterstones Books Quarterly

Waterstones Books Quarterly
'...a master storyteller at work...confirms Chabon's status as one
of the truly great living American writers.'

Guardian
'...Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into
something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words.'

Customer Reviews

410 pages too long
The Yiddish Policemen's Union was, in my opinion 410 (paperback)
pages too long. To read this you have to know UK Yiddish,(I do)
USA Yiddish & USA police slang & street slang. How many of the
reviewers are this qualified? I think the newspaper reviews were
edited as I don't think the reviewers come into all the above
catorgories.I don't know any of my contemporary Jewish friends
who would call another a YID. I guess he has a loving mother
who purchased all his other work?

Yes, it went on too long
Yes, it went on too long. Like a movie that can't seem to end without going down still a few more hairpin curves, this novel keeps piling on the adventures. But the novel has already said what it had to say about halfway through.

This is a very much overrated book by an overrated author. The premise is only partly original, as most of the plot is borrowed from other good and not so good mysteries, and the whole idea, of a temporary Jewish state in Alaska, is only mildly amusing. The author does not do enough with it. He does not do enough to IMAGINE this alternate universe very well. What does the Jewish Sitka really feel like and look like, and what does the existence of a homeland in exile really mean for people like the one the novel supposes would live in Sitka -- about these things we learn next to nothing. By the middle of the book we have even run out of Jewish jokes.

I wish Chabon had written a funnier book, and I wish at the same time that he had taken the book he was writing more seriously.

In a word, this book is a potboiler for the postmodern set, and nothing more.

Alaska? No, she went of her own accordion...
Jewish culture has always interested me. All the Jewish characters and actors and writers and comedians on television got to play with language in such intriguing ways when I was a kid, with that surly sense of humour, that I admired them so much: Jackie Mason, Shatner & Nimoy, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Richard Belzer. And I love the sound of Yiddish. Meshugginer is one of my favourite words ever.

So I approached the Yiddish Policemen's Union with much joy, knowing that that wonderful take on life would be written so well here. Especially as Michael Chabon is one of those authors who always turns out something good.

The book is an alternate history peace in which Jewish refugees are not given Israel to live in at the end of the war, but instead move to Alaska. Meyer Landsman investigates the death of a young man with a strange charisma, and discovers that there is a threat to the Jewish nation and to the world, that neatly mirrors certain events in our world. Also, he has to contend with his ex-wife being his superior.

Part of the book is very much a detective story of the kind Dashiell Hammett or Robert Crais might write, but the alternate history and the binding of this with Jewish identity and culture draws the work a little higher. That there is a conspiracy at work is a little too formulaic, I think, but helps draw the novel to its conclusion, with its hope for the future.

The book has a great sense of humour, it's sharply written, with a good sense of location and living, breathing characters. Is it a detective novel with delusions of grandeur? Is it a literary novel that apes the popular style and deconstructs it to bring out the truth? Probably a bit of both, though I suspect that based on the interviews and reading lists in the back of book, that Chabon enjoys writing detective stories.

Either way, it's a fine read and well worth your time.