Mondo Bungle

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, 2001

Another tremendously grand, yet somehow just as modest, Pulitzer prize winner. I think it's actually pretty easy to compare to Middlesex, the other one I've read. There's much thematic overlap despite the conceptual distinctions: insanely satisfying linguistic acrobatics and frequent hilarity, themes of starting a new life of theoretical prosperity, the plight of the characters' paradoxical longing to escape and remain in equal measure, the realized contentedness of simply being.

But this story is about two Jewish comic book masterminds and their claim to fictional fame during the golden early years of the graphic novel, and the post-WWII state of being a washed up artist. The mainer of the main characters, a Josef Kavalier, is inconspicuously shuttled from Prague to New York as a burgeoning master of illusions and escapes, to find anyway to help his run down family. His cousin seems to invoke a dormant artistic ability, and together they pretty much just put on a clinic in the comic book world. But if it ended on that high note the book would be pretty lame and pointless. There are toils, suffocating the characters like shovelfuls of grave dirt upon a freshly lain casket.

That's the plot, but it's not about the plot. The delivery is poetic and moving and never dull. So much ground is indeed covered under the seemingly non-complex guise of the general story line, a lot that I looked forward to every time I opened it.

5/5

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