The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years.  I kept picking it up and then deciding to read something else.  Last year, I read Telegraph Avenue, which is also by Michael Chabon, and really did't care for it, which also took away some of my motivation to read Kavalier & Clay.  But I've been looking at the lists of past Pulitzer winners and a lot of "Best of" lists and this book kept popping up.  So, while I was home for Spring Break, I decided to bite the bullet and finally read it.  And I am so glad that I did.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay tells an amazing story of family, friendship, and creativity.  Oh boy, that made it sound super cheesy and this book is not at all cheesy.  A complaint that I have heard about this book is that it is overwritten, which is definitely something that I felt when I was reading Telegraph Avenue, but that overwriting made sense here, at least to me.  The book tells the story of comic book writers, spending a lot of time discussing a visual art form that we, the readers, cannot see.  The writing style helped me to see the clarity of a picture that I would see if I were reading a comic book, even in the parts of the book that had nothing to do with comics.  In that way, I felt like the whole book was mirroring the art form it was discussing, even though it was all prose and no pictures.  I felt very connected to all of the characters in this book, which is actually quite rare for me, and was honestly disappointed when I would learn that certain chapters were just the origin stories for their comic book characters, because I wanted to know more about them.  I would tell myself that I was going to stop reading at the end of the chapter and catch myself in the middle of the next one because I didn't want to stop reading.  The book flowed beautifully.  Even though it covered a pretty large expanse of time, even the jumps were smooth, not leaving behind huge gaps, and the gaps that were left were always filled in in some creative way or another.  This book gave me a look into a world that I knew nothing about and now I want to read and learn more about this early comic book world.  I will also add that I loved Chabon's use of historical characters (most notably Orson Wells and Salvador Dalí) to connect his fictional characters to a world that I know about and understand.

I give this book 4 out of 5 sequinbeasts.