num_pages: 642
description: Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; 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
language: English
title: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
titlecomplete: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
characters: Sam Clay, Rosa Saks, Joe Kavalier
genres: Fiction, Historical, Jewish, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, New York, Historical Fiction, Comics, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 200077
places: New York (State), The United States of America, Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, New York City, New York, Czechoslovakia, Prague (Praha), Brooklyn, New York City, New York
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Gaylactic Spectrum Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: California Book Award
category: Fiction (Gold), awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: New York City Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction