The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Today my book club met to discuss a novel that I chose, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I felt bad almost immediately after picking it when I got responses from people in the group who said they'd sit out this month due to the immense length of this book, and the guilt was compounded when I began the first chapter and kept needing to look up words. (I'm not talking about a couple, but what felt like one per paragraph.) I picked the book because though he says now he's never even heard of it, I swear years ago my brother told me about it. (If not, I had a dream he did because the memory is very vivid.) So the seed was planted then, and later I learned it won the Pulitzer Prize (another seed). Last year I read his newest book, a collection of personal essays called Manhood for Amateurs (and really enjoyed it). I later read another nonfiction book of his (Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands--a collection of essays about--you guessed it--reading and writing) and thought it was funny that this man is famous for his fiction and I am a fiction junkie (not that you can tell with all the nonfiction I've been reading lately) yet hadn't read any of his. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay seemed like a good place to start since those seeds had been planted and then right before it was my turn to pick the next book for book club, I came upon a used copy of the novel and wah-lah, it seemed like "fate."

So here's the low-down about the book-- it's an incredible, complex novel with a wonderful, fascinating storyline BUT is written in this totally pretentious manner. It's very showoff-y with his big obscure words and analogies within analogies within analogies. (Who writes metaphors for their metaphors?) If you can get past these things, it's a very worthwhile read. It's a historical novel, set in the late 1930s about two cousins who create comic books about an escape artist superhero who fights the Nazis (one of the cousins is a Jew who immigrated here from Prague to flee the oppression there and his motivation behind the comics is to save money to get his family over here to safety as well). I don't want to tell more than that in case anyone wants to read it because it truly is a wonderful story. Alan was turned off by the book when I'd read aloud some of the words being used, but when I raved on about the actual story, he said he'd like to read it--uttered right before starting a completely different novel. Ah, someday...I suppose it's a book you have to be in the mood for to really enjoy.