the adventures of kavalier and clay review

This melodramatic getawayDalmost foiled when the Nazi officer inspecting the corpse decides the suit it's wearing is too fine to buryDis presented with the careful attention to detail of a true-life adventure. Denied exit from Nazi Czechoslovakia with the visa his family sold its fortune to buy him, Joe, a disciple of Houdini, enlists the aid of his former teacher, the celebrated stage illusionist Bernard Kornblum, in a more desperate escape: crouched inside the coffin transporting Prague's famous golem, Rabbi Loew's miraculous automaton, to the safety of exile in Lithuania. This improbable route marks only the first in a lifetime of timely escapes. Joe Kavalier, a former Prague art student, arrives in Brooklyn by way of Siberia, Japan and San Francisco. Sammy is a gifted inventor of characters and situations who dreams ''the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape.'' His contribution to the superhero's alter ego, Tom Mayflower, is his own stick legs, a legacy of childhood polio. Chabon's prodigious gifts for language, humor and wonderment come to full maturity in this fictional history of the legendary partnership between Sammy Klayman and Josef Kavalier, cousins and creators of the prewar masked comic book hero, the Escapist. This epic novel about the glory years of the American comic book (1939-1954) fulfills all the promise of Chabon's two earlier novels (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Wonder Boys) and two collections of short stories (A Model World Werewolves in Their Youth), and nearly equals them all together in number of pages.

The adventures of kavalier and clay review