Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14578 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 'What really impresses about Chabon's eighth book is the author's ability to take a far-off, unfamiliar landscape and make it so densely, vividly imagined that 50 pages in the reader feels like they've know it forever.' Daily Mail 'A marvellous, masterly reinvigoration of the detective genre.' Daily Telegraph '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 'Like his half-Yiddish, half-American-speaking subjects, Chabon cannot help but make new and awe-inspiring literary alliances and the result is a unique novel as irresistible as a fresh bagel.' The Observer 'The first - but hopefully not last - Yiddish noir.' Evening Standard '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

The Chosen Frozen
The novel supposes that in 1940 the American Congress had passed the Sitka Settlement Act to allow the persecuted Jews of Europe to seek refuge, for an interim period of sixty years, in the newly created autonomous `federal district' of Sitka on Baranof Island, which my atlas tells me is a narrow sliver, about 100 miles long and 25 miles wide, in the south-eastern tail of Alaska. But it was a kind of ghetto: to appease the American public, the Act prohibited the refugees from moving off the island. A trickle of Jews, mainly from Germany and Poland, are supposed to have arrived there soon afterwards, to be joined after the war by a flood of Displaced Persons and other Jews who could not go to Israel, because that state is supposed to have been snuffed out by the Arabs after only three months. After the sixty years were up, Sitka was to `revert' to become part of Alaska and the Jews of Sitka were supposed to find somewhere else to go. By that time Sitka had a population of two million and had acquired a thoroughly Yiddish character, with Yiddish names for shops, districts and public buildings, Yiddish (secular) cops and Yiddish (religious) gangsters - all to the resentment of the original inhabitants of the area, the Tlingit Indian tribe. The book opens as the date of the `Reversion' draws near.

Meyer Landsman is a Yiddish police detective who has not been very effective in the past and now has to solve a murder. That genre is not unfamiliar, nor, especially in American fiction, is the laconic dialogue. But here the text is sprinkled with Yiddish words, whose meaning the non-Yiddish speaker can usually, but not always, work out. Yiddish has many wonderful curses, but sometimes only American four letter words will do. The humour has a Yiddish flavour, and the author's own English is full of wisecracks and of immensely inventive and vivid similes. The setting - especially among the ultra-orthodox `black hats' - is very atmospheric.

Landsman does eventually unravel the murder mystery, though in the process he stumbles into and escapes from some tight corners that cry out to be made into a movie.

It's not always an easy read, partly because of the extreme complexities of the plot, but also because Chabon's narrative technique, for all its humour and raciness, is sometimes more opaque than I think it needs to be. Oh, and there's just one brief and insignificant reference to the Policemen's Union of the title.

Stylish Thriller, Unique Setting
The central character in this book is a drink dependant, divorced cop, who has problems with authority. So far so hackneyed; but Meyer Landsman's beat is in Sitka, Alaska; a Jewish homeland set up in 1948. Israel as we know it does not exist.

Interested? Well you should be.

Firstly, this is an excellent piece of detective fiction; the plot is intricate and the characters are well rounded and believable. In addition to an excellent story, the action takes in a beautifully realised alternate reality. Landsman's Alaskan homeland feels as though it exists somewhere more solid than in the Michael Chabon's imagination. This is counter-factual story telling at its best.

Chabon's writing style is heavy with metaphor, which I take as a positive but I imagine for some may become wearisome. I did find the novel a little difficult to feel my way into. The author often uses twenty words to describe something when fewer would have sufficed. The novel also contains many Jewish terms. Since I'm not Jewish, I found this broke up the narrative flow as I had to decipher what was meant by a particular word or phrase. As I become used to the style, I found that, like reading the subtitles to a good foreign film, it soon ceased to matter.

Perhaps the book's most remarkable feature is that despite being set in an entirely fictitious world, it deals sensitively with issues facing the Jewish diaspora in this world and the divisions within the holy land. Chabon really seems to have a handle on the strengths and frailties of the Jewish psyche. All of this makes the Yiddish Policemen's Union a memorable piece of crime fiction and a truly exceptional novel.

Frustrating
Kavalier & Clay is one of my all time favourite books, and when this came out I pounced on it in eager anticipation of a fabulous read. I have to say I was slightly disappointed. Chabon's story telling style is still epic and at times very funny, even in a fairly bleak book like this and there were moments of great beauty and insight that made me light up inside and go 'oooh', but on the whole it was incredibly hard work.

The story revolves around the idea that part of Alaska has been ceded to the dispossessed Jews after WWII on the proviso that they only have it for sixty years and when that time is up they have to find somewhere else to go. The story starts just as the lease is about to expire. Meyer Landsman, a Jewish cop, has made a mess of his life and is living on vodka and cigarettes in a flophouse. A body in the same hostel turns his life around as he races to discover the murderer against the political clock ticking loudly in the background.

The basic cop story is traditional but done with this Jewish Noir twist that makes it extraordinary. It was however, extremely hard work if you are not Jewish or don't know much about Jewish life and lore, which I don't. There were quite a few things I didn't understand and which rather than break the flow and keep looking up every five minutes I decided to hope would become explicable as the book moved on. Some do, some don't, but it was quite frustrating, at times like reading a book in another language altogether.

Because of this it took me a long time to get into the story and I didn't really pick up the pace until nearly half way through. It's testament to Chabon's ability that I stuck with it that long, as with other books I would have been tempted to give up. As it is, the plot pulls you along nicely to the end and things become a lot more understandable as the book goes on.