Sometimes you find a book and you realize that it was written for you. I feel that way about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's been sitting on my shelf since my mad trip to Massachusetts this past summer and I finally began to read it this afternoon. I'm only a sixth of the way into the book right now, but I'm already in love.
I want to recommend this book to everyone. At the same time, I hesitate; I'm not sure that anyone out there but me would get it.
Obviously, I'm wrong. The book's won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards, and was a New York Times bestseller. Clearly, other people get this book.
So, the book. Why do I like it? Why does it speak to me? Should I say that much of the first part of the book concerns a young Jew's escape from Nazi-invaded Prague along with the golem, stored in a coffin, presented as historical fact? Should I point out that the boy escapes to New York and, with his cousin, makes comic books? Should I mention the dedication to Will Eisner? Or even the fact that this is the first book I've read in a long, long time that made me get out a dictionary?
Maybe. Maybe this is enough for you to understand. Or maybe I need to quote you the opening paragraph, the paragraph that hooked me in, and let the book speak for itself:
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "you weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation."