Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of. Wide-ranging, inventive and entirely compelling, Kavalier and Clay deserves a place alongside the best of recent American fiction. Here’s the synopsis for Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: It is New York City in 1939. Taking a staple of American popular culture as its enduring image, Kavalier and Clay charts the frustrated love affairs and family relationships of its protagonists against a backdrop of American politics and attitudes towards the European situation before Pearl Harbor.

But success for Joe is only a means to the end of rescuing his parents and brother, still trapped in a darkening Europe.Ĭhabon has created a novel that aspires to the historical sweep of DeLillo's Underworld.

The figure they develop, The Escapist ('Houdini, but mixed with Robin Hood and a little bit of Albert Schweitzer'), caricatures rage against the Nazis as the liberating hero frees the oppressed masses around the world. When Joe arrives in Brooklyn at the home of his more worldly and cynical cousin, Sammy Klayman, Joe's artistic talents suggest to Sam a means of making money in the burgeoning superhero market. Magician-in-training Josef Kavalier escapes Czechoslovakia in 1939 and is taken in by his aunt and his scrappy cousin Sammy Klayman, who live in Brooklyn. His teacher, an elderly Jewish magician, tests his escapology skills to the limit when he smuggles Josef out of occupied Prague in the coffin of the Golem, the mythical Jewish homunculus. The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay is a great American novel about two cousins whose talents, fevered dreams and crazy obsessions make them legends during the Golden Era of comic books. Josef Kavalier is a serious young man who grows up in Prague obsessed with the exploits of Harry Houdini.

The amazing adventures of kavalier