Remembering how pleased we were when Andrew and I pursued our Proust marathon, we’ve now formed a habit of reading together. Actually Andrew reads and I listen, and we have a lot of fun, pausing for conversation when we want to discuss this-or-that point brought up from what we’ve just read.
Recently, after some long travels abroad, we got back to reading and we dived in to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I did not know the book but I soon came to know about it, as I discovered that it was an important work, having been awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. With my love of books, I should have known about it, and I couldn’t help but ask myself where I was when the prize was announced. Somehow I missed all the brouhaha. Now, as the prize’s 25th anniversary approaches, I find myself knee-deep in this fabulous book, and everything else about it that’s come along.
I became aware of the book when New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced its up-coming season, opening with a new opera based on the book. Six additional performances follow (we go on October 8th) and it might not be too far off-base to say that since late spring, the conversation we’ve heard around town has included plenty of talk about Chabon’s book.
And it is, in my opinion, a truly, wonderful book. I started reading it in mid-June and I suppose I talked about it so much—just like with the Proust—that Andrew couldn’t help but suggest that we use it for our next read. And as he read, I realized just how good the book is.
If I’m raving so much about the book, you’re probably asking yourself what it’s all about? Well, that’s where it takes a little skill to figure it out. For example, at one point there’s a break of about eleven years in the story, with no reference or note about the in-between time. And there are also a few (just a few) situations when a coincidence or the mention of one event without any connection with what’s just happened or might happen, doesn’t connect with anything else.
But that’s not a big deal, since the book is so well written and represents an unarguable example of what we used to call a “page-turner,” a story so engrossing that we can’t put the book down. The reader just keeps being swept up in what’s happening, with little or no attempts by Chabon (or his editors) to “make it easy” for readers.
Despite these very minor points, the book works very well as a fine way to get out of yourself. Or to put aside some of what you’re thinking about what’s going on all around you and just get caught up in what you’re reading (or listening to). And the book landed big: Newsweek called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book,” and The New York Review of Books called it Chabon’s “magnum opus.” And that line of praise seems to have been on-going: one writer (Shelley Harris) in The Independent in December 2011, ten years after the book was published, went so far as to call The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay “the book of a lifetime.” And she doesn’t qualify her judgement, simply writing that her description was made “for the uncomplicated reason that I’ve spent my whole life reading, and it’s the best book I’ve ever read.”
So what’s the book about, you might ask (as if there’s a simple response to that question!)?
I’ve read several summaries, and the best I’ve seen (in my opinion) takes us back to Shelley Harris:
“It won the Pulitzer Prize, but you don’t have to give two hoots about the Great American Novel to love it. It is set in New York during the Golden Age of comic books, and you don’t have to care very much about that either to be tugged into its story of two cousins, the comicbook superhero they create, and the real-life dangers that threaten them.
“Josef Kavalier smuggles himself out of occupied Prague in a coffin and ends up “slumped like a question mark against the door frame” in the Brooklyn bedroom of his cousin Sam Clay. Together they invent The Escapist, a superhero “whose powers would be that of impossible and perpetual escape.” And escape is this novel’s preoccupation. While their superhero trounces Hitler in their pages, Josef obsessively tries to free his family from the Nazis and Sam, covertly gay in an era of bigotry, has his own bonds to slip.
“There are, as promised, amazing adventures here, talks of dangers and romance, tragedy and triumph, delivered with sly humor in forensically beautiful prose. It’s a confident novel—laughably so at times, Chabon spinning yarns in parentheses pages long, or leading the reader audaciously-constructed sentences on which we never, not once, miss our footing. This is hardcore stuff, utterly uncompromising, a gripping adventure in language which sings.”
And the opera? My guess is that the MET will have its own version of the story, with some changes here and there. And in any case, it would—it seems to me—be difficult to squeeze all the content of the book into a three-hour opera. In any case, we can get a bit of what we might expect from this excerpt from the MET’s season catalog, with this image on its cover:
“In this exhilarating new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. Incorporating scintillating electronic elements and a variety of musical styles, composer Mason Bates’s eclectic score moves seamlessly among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy.”
And the catalog description continues: “Bartlett Sher’s production provides spectacular visuals to match, with towering sets and proscenium-filling projections. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Opening Night premiere, and baritone Andrzej Filończyk makes his Met debut as the artist Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechslovakia and arrives at the Brooklyn doorstep of writer Sam Clay, sung by tenor Miles Mykkanen.”
So what’s it going to be? Read the book? See the opera? Or must it be one or the other?
If you’re interested in what I discover about this much-anticipated experience, catch up with me after October 8th. I’m sure I’ll have something to say.