Product Description

One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay's cramped New York bedroom, his arduous and nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved - with the help of his mentor, the master illusionist Kornblum. But little does he realise that this uneasy first meeting is the start of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. For Sam, Joe's formidable artistic skills are a chance to liberate them both from lives as inventory clerks at Empire Novelties Incorporated. Together, they create a comic strip called The Escapist, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world with his Golden Key. The Escapist makes them their fortune and their name, but, as the situation worsens in Europe, Joe can only think of one thing: how can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler? Michael Chabon's exceptional new novel is a thrilling tightrope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons. Their story, which ranges from the heady heights of the American Dream to the desperation and grief of the Second World War, and which journeys from New York and Czechoslovakia to the Antarctic, will live on in the mind of the reader long after the final page is turned.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #626031 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.co.uk 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

Mail on Sunday Paperback review by Simon Shaw, 12th Aug 2001
'...makes the reader want to race through to the find out what happens, while at the same time wishing it will never end.'

Independent
'Dazzling. Chabon has not so much attempted the great American novel as brought to life the idea that it had already been written - week by week, in the humble heroism of the comic book.'

Customer Reviews

Amazingly adventurous!
Like his superheroes, author Michael Chabon has pulled off an amazing feat of his own, challenging the dark forces of intolerance and elevating and empowering the little man in this terrific novel. Set in the late '30s and early '40s, the novel follows Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, and his cousin Sam Clay, creators of superheroes and producers of comic books which attack the Nazis and inspire those who oppose them. As the reader learns about the comic book industry and the sociological conditions which made comics so popular, s/he also experiences the cousins' personal frustrations as they work to gain freedom for Joe's family, deal with industry "moneymen" who take advantage of them, and search for enduring love.

No brief summary of the action, however, can begin to convey the depth and scope of this imaginative and original novel. Chabon manages never to lose sight of the Nazi menace while putting it into completely new contexts, including magic, superheroes, Houdini-like escapes, golems, and comic book characters, and ranging from Prague to New York and Antarctica (a section that could have used some pruning). It is a novel of huge scope--and it is hugely entertaining! Mary Whipple

Great characters and lots of research
This is a large book but a quick read - the cover is a little off putting with its 'historical drama' typeface but it is immediately apparent that the author has some serious social comments to make. He makes you interested in characters and the world events that have formed them. More impressively he jumps between the present, the recent past and key historical moments with ease - sometimes disorientating the reader but always to positive narrative effect.

What differentiates this from other historical american novelists such as Bellow or Roth is it's magical, child-like merging of the fantasy world of the comic book with the real horrors of the holocaust. Whereas for someone like Bellow this is always there but often unsaid or unspeakable, popping up in the cracks of modern relationships (think of Herzog), here it is more explicitly dealt with, the comic book world becoming a less than subtly metaphor for world events overtaking them.

I relished the way pre-war America was evoked via comic books - the half-stolen, half original plots and superheroes, the tawdry relationship between sponsorship and 'art' etc . . . I also enjoyed the sheer scope of the novel's abmitions - covering the horrors of anti-semitism, exile, warfare, suppressed homesexuality and what makes a 'family'. This shows great breadth of research, and my only complaint is that at times this can be worn a little heavily - the potted histories of the comic book industry did however make me hungry to find out more about this archetypical slice of 20th Century American history. Furthermore, this historical and geographical leaping about can lead to the narrative being over-reliant on the fantastic coincidence to tie things together. For the most part however Chabron pulls this off, perhaps because he makes us fundamentally care about the characters in the first place.

Finally, this book did what all my favourite books have done - that is to have left me caring enough about the characters to miss them when they were gone and wanting to know that, after all they have been through, Sammy, Joe and Rosa (and little Tommy) will live the happy, somewhat less eventful but contented lives they deserve.

An absolute must read
Superbly written and engrossing story about two cousins, American Samuel Klayman, and Polish refuge Josef Kavalier, who first meet as the young refuge is shoved into bed alongside his cousin. Before that happens though Josef has to engineer his escape from the Nazi threat in Poland. They grow up and establish themselves as a partnership in comics. The story is complex and meaningful, and any attempt to give a synopsis would only spoil the pleasure for the reader. That it covers a lifetime; trauma, love, devotion, loyalty, loss and sacrifice and much more should suffice.
What shines through is a most beautiful story of the developing relationship between the two cousins and Rosa, the extravagant young girl who becomes inextricably involved with the two boys. There is a beautiful air of melancholy that pervades the story at times, including circumstances that surround Sam in relation to the isolation his sexual inclinations create for him. Full of wit and humour and humanity, the writing is superb, a sheer pleasure to read. This is truly a book that cannot be recommended too highly, an absolute must read