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357 Pages·2012·3.78 MB·English

Pulitzerr Prize Wiinner

Ajaytao
Authors: Chabon, Michael

Formats: PDF

Ids: Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Douban Books, 9780812983586
Tags: American‐Lit., Classics, Fiction, Literary, Masterpiece

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 

The beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon
masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Now with
special bonus material by Michael Chabon. 

A “towering, swash‐buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New
York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clayis a triumph of originality, imagination, and 
storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist 
and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the 
long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, 
and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal 
partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them 
deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old‐fashioned American ambition. From the shared 
fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist‐fighting 
Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the 
streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, 
as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s 
finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.  

NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER 

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book
Prize 

Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award 

Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly 
Amazon.com Review
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life
and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand
Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming
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 equalizer
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 epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book
artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal
haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take
on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing
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as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains
him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even
that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some
increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the
Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh andWonder 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 aging 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, in other words, of a world gone completely
mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to
escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park
From Booklist
Virtuoso Chabon takes intense delight in the practice of his art, and never has his joy been more palpable than in this
funny and profound tale of exile, love, and magic. In his last novel, The Wonder Boys(1995), Chabon explored the
shadow side of literary aspirations. Here he revels in the crass yet inventive and comforting world of comic-book
superheroes, those masked men with mysterious powers who were born in the wake of the Great Depression and
who carried their fans through the horrors of war with the guarantee that good always triumphs over evil. In a
luxuriant narrative that is jubilant and purposeful, graceful and complex, hilarious and enrapturing, Chabon chronicles
the fantastic adventures of two Jewish cousins, one American, one Czech. It's 1939 and Brooklynite Sammy Klayman
dreams of making it big in the nascent world of comic books. Joseph Kavalier has never seen a comic book, but he is
an accomplished artist versed in the "autoliberation" techniques of his hero, Harry Houdini. He effects a great (and
surreal) escape from the Nazis, arrives in New York, and joins forces with Sammy. They rapidly create the Escapist,
the first of many superheroes emblematic of their temperaments and predicaments, and attain phenomenal success.
But Joe, tormented by guilt and grief for his lost family, abruptly joins the navy, abandoning Sammy, their work, and
his lover, the marvelous artist and free spirit Rosa, who, unbeknownst to him, is carrying his child. As Chabon--
equally adept at atmosphere, action, dialogue, and cultural commentary--whips up wildly imaginative escapades
punctuated by schtick that rivals the best of Jewish comedians, he plumbs the depths of the human heart and
celebrates the healing properties of escapism and the "genuine magic of art" with exuberance and wisdom. Donna
Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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The Amazing
Adventures of
 Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
Tomyfather
TheESCAPEARTIST
1
3
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PARTII
ACOUPLE
ofBOY
GENIUSES
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PARTIII
THE
FUNNY-BOOKWAR
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PARTIV
The
GOLDENAGE
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PARTV
RADIOMAN
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2
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PARTVI
theLEAGUEoftheGOLDENKEY
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3
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AUTHOR’SNOTE
PARTI
TheESCAPEARTIST
1
INLATERYEARS,holdingforthtoaninterviewerortoanaudienceofagingfansatacomicbook
convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that
backwhenhewasaboy,sealedandhog-tiedinsidetheairtightvesselknownasBrooklyn, New
York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Rent in a phone booth
and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly
expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. “You weren’t
the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know,
back when he was just getting started. It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a
question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid,
Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great
heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the
roleofhisownimagination—intheEscapist’sbirth,likeallofhisbestfabulations,rangtrue.His
dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind
cocoon,madforatasteoflightandair.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He
wasseventeenwhentheadventuresbegan:bigmouthed,perhapsnotquiteasquickonhisfeet
as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in
any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed,
with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he
always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each
morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more
than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough.
He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He
had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had
hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy
and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet
fiveinchestall.Likeallofhisfriends,heconsidereditacomplimentwhensomebodycalledhim
a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television,
atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his
days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader
with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe,
Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the
usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those
two-bitargosiesofbloodandwonder,thepulps.Hehadtrackeddownandreadeverybiweekly
issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete
runsof TheAvenger and DocSavage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay—and the true history of the Escapist’s birth—began in 1939,
toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied
theringandironknucklesofherlefthandtothesideofhiscranium,andtoldhimtomoveover
and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the
hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a
slenderyoungmanofabouthisownage,slumpedlikeaquestionmarkagainstthedoorframe,
a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across
his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef
Kavalier, her brother Emil’s son, who had arrived in New York tonight on a Greyhound bus, all