book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Amy recommended this book highly to me, and I do the same for you. It's about two young Jewish men, Sam Clay living in Brooklyn in the Depression, and his Czech cousin, Josef Kavalier, who shows up in the middle of the night having escaped, along an arduous journey, from the increasing Nazi oppression in 1939. Sam, a creative, optimistic, excitable, wiseass storyteller, and Joe, a magician, visual artist, and escape artist, jump into the new world of comic books that was exploding with the likes of Superman and Batman, and their greatest creation becomes a nationwide best-seller. The plot goes on to span decades of their "amazing adventures" together, their lives and loves, recounting their childhoods, Sam's Vaudevillian, absent father, Joe's apprenticeship as a magician in Czechoslovakia and his escape, and Joe's lifelong battle, both imaginary and real, with the Nazis. On one level, it is about the whole fascinating comic book business, and, as a reader of Marvel comics as a child, it's very fun in this regard -- lots of inside details about all the characters in the business, presumably based on lots of research, and I think Mark would really like it for this reason -- but it's much more than this. It's a real saga full of rich and fascinating characters. The writing is incredibly inventive and captivating, with great descriptions of scenes, people, and events. It's hilarious at times and absolutlely gut-wrenching at others. It was the rare book I hated to see end. As you can tell, I really liked it.
