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jeriendhalSummary: Escaping Nazi occupied Poland, classically trained artist, escapologist and occasionally housebreaker Josef Kavalier travels to New York City, where he meets his American cousin Sammy Clay, a comic book artist with big ideas but not enough skill to get them going. Together, they create one of classic heroes of the golden age of comics, The Escapist, as they dive in the world of fantasy to escape the pressures of reality, in Josef's case alienation as he loses his family to the Nazis and in Sammy's the realization of his deviant sexuality.
Kavalier and Clay is an odd duck of a book, bouncing between the fantastic and mundane, and a definite dark horse (so to speak) for a Pulitzer Prize winner. On the one hand we've got the kitchen sink drama of Sammy, a Jewish New Yawk kid, with polio afflicted legs and the dawning, damning realization that he's a homosexual in the 1940's and 50's, eventually marrying a woman he doesn't love for the sake of her honor and his cousin's child.
On the other, we've got his cousin Josef, who escapes Poland to Lithuania to Japan to America, after helping liberate the actual Golem from its hiding place in a Jewish apartment block. With Sammy he creates the Escapist, enjoys a brief but meteoric career in comic books, foils a Barmitzva bomber, becomes trapped at the South Pole, then goes on to invent the graphic novel at least ten years before Wil Eisner publishes "A Contract With God."
Along the way we enjoy Michael Chabon's cheerful and obvious love of comics, as he sends his stand ins for Schuster & Siegel through their brief career as comic book innovators. The plot, though more a series of interconnected incidents, as the novel moves through about fifteen years of times, moves briskly and never allows the melodrama to bog down the pace.
Read it. Then pick up Dark Horse Comic's The Escapist trade paperback collection, so you can read the origin of one of greatest comic book heroes that never really existed.
Kavalier and Clay is an odd duck of a book, bouncing between the fantastic and mundane, and a definite dark horse (so to speak) for a Pulitzer Prize winner. On the one hand we've got the kitchen sink drama of Sammy, a Jewish New Yawk kid, with polio afflicted legs and the dawning, damning realization that he's a homosexual in the 1940's and 50's, eventually marrying a woman he doesn't love for the sake of her honor and his cousin's child.
On the other, we've got his cousin Josef, who escapes Poland to Lithuania to Japan to America, after helping liberate the actual Golem from its hiding place in a Jewish apartment block. With Sammy he creates the Escapist, enjoys a brief but meteoric career in comic books, foils a Barmitzva bomber, becomes trapped at the South Pole, then goes on to invent the graphic novel at least ten years before Wil Eisner publishes "A Contract With God."
Along the way we enjoy Michael Chabon's cheerful and obvious love of comics, as he sends his stand ins for Schuster & Siegel through their brief career as comic book innovators. The plot, though more a series of interconnected incidents, as the novel moves through about fifteen years of times, moves briskly and never allows the melodrama to bog down the pace.
Read it. Then pick up Dark Horse Comic's The Escapist trade paperback collection, so you can read the origin of one of greatest comic book heroes that never really existed.
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Date: 2008-01-15 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 04:43 pm (UTC)Harry Turtledove's series of alternate World War II History. Everything's goin' to plan, then ALIENS INVADE!
http://www.amazon.com/Balance-Alternate-History-Second-Worldwar/dp/0345388526/ref=pd_sim_b_img_2
That's the first one, but you can pick them up for a lot less from a used book store.