Quick Review:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalierand Clay by Michael Chabon
Published: 2000
Genre: Historical Epic with hints of Fantasy and Humor
Available at you local bookstore.
Bob's Grade: A
Full Review
I am going to take a little different approach to reviewing this novel. The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Chabon about two Jewish men during World War II who tap into the comic book craze by inventing a Nazi killing super hero called the Escapist. There are many subplots within this book, dealing with a vast array of issues, but in the end it’s mainly a book about family and the extremes a person will go to try to protect them. Chabon pins this simple concept in to an incredible and often complicated tale full of action and humor.
Now, as a person who is mostly a popcorn reader, who tends to stay away from acclaimed literature, I was hesitant to pick up any Pulitzer Prize winner. Now, as a reviewer, I ask who am I to judge a novel that has receive the ultimate of literary achievement. My greatest praise fore this book is it was highly readable, not pretentious and had some of the more intriguing characters I have met within the walls of a novel for a while. If you are intimidated by the size, or by the acclaim of this book, don’t be. It is as accessible as any other well written novel for the masses.
So, my approach to reviewing this novel was a little different. I decided to check out the Amazon reviewers and see what the masses had to say. For the most part the reviews were glowing, yet, about 100 of the 500 or so reviewers rated it one or two starts out of five. I was intrigued by there reasoning, so I tried to find common reasoning behind the negative reviews. So here were what most of them boiled down to.
Group One: The Whackjobs. A few reviewers where upset that with the novel’s attempt to make us feel for the main characters plight to save his Jewish Family who were living in Nazi controlled Prague. These reviewers found this to be another attempt by ??? at propaganda and exploiting the holocaust. These reviewers reminded us that there where much larger cases of genocide in history. To me that’s like telling one family not to mourn the death of their child, because another family had two children die.
Group Two: The Conservatives. I don’t mean this as a value judgment, but some people cannot handle, for whatever reasons, the inclusion of a homosexual as a main character. Some people are too put off by this inclusion to be able enjoy the many other aspects and subplots of this novel.
Group Three: The Observant. Some people complained that this book was “all about comic books.” While you should have been able to pick that up by reading the back blurb, I can understand what your saying. I loved the comic book business aspects, even as a non-comic book reader. Beypmd that this book had comic bookesque sequences of the fantastic, similar to books like Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump. Yet, this book, was a fantasy cloaked in reality, and these bits of the fantastic may have put off many who strive for reality or lack imagination.
Group Four: The Anti-articas. Within the nearly 700 hundred pages of this novel, filled with Gollems, escape artists, and a vast array of fantastic comic characters what most people seemed to most hate was a 70 page section where the main character enlists in the army and becomes a radio engineer stationed in a remote base in Antartica. While, I can’t find any proof that such a base ever existed (who cares if it did) there have been plenty of rumors of Nazi interest in Antartica. While this wasn’t the best sequence within the novel, it worked well to symbolize the utter desire for isolation the character desires. This is a frequent literary device Chabon uses, settings symbolizes emotion. New York stood for freedom, The Empire States building symbolized success, Pre-war Eastern Europe stood for oppression and the suburbs stood for settling and futility. These themes pepper this tale which is why, for me, sending a character who wants to isolate himself from the world to Antartica worked.
Group Five: The “I couldn’t finish it.” Finally, there are just some people who this book just wasn’t right for. That’s fine. While I loved it, nothing is for everyone.
Check Out Michael Chabon's Website.
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