Amazing

Finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay last night, and it is, in a word, amazing. It's the story of two young men, Josef Kavalier, a Jewish kid who flees from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and his Brooklyn-born cousin Sam Clay, as they dream up The Escapist, a hero dedicated to liberating the innocent all over the world. I would say the book is a close examination of the complex relationships between the creators and their hero, but that doesn't do the whole book justice. In the book you read about how the two men battle their inner demons, fall in love, conquer the world, get battered and badly beat up, get their hearts broken, and finally escape the chains that have bound them, in a manner worthy of The Escapist himself.

A few pages before finishing the novel, I was struck by how much reading a wonderful book is rather like falling in love with a beautiful girl. You can't get enough, and you know inevitably that somewhere along the way you're going to get your heart broken, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but whether it ends well or it ends badly, you know it's going to stay with you for quite some time, and you could only be so lucky.

- posted by jaemark @ 8/14/2005 09:37:00 PM