The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael  Chabon


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      MICHAEL CHABON

      The AMAZING ADVENTURES of KAVALIER & CLAY

       A NOVEL

       DEDICATION

      To my father

       EPIGRAPH

      We have this history of impossible solutions

      for insoluble problems.

      —WILL EISNER, in conversation

      Wonderful escape!

      —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “Wakefield”

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

      12

       PART III THE FUNNY-BOOK WAR

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

       PART IV THE GOLDEN AGE

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

      16

      17

       PART V RADIOMAN

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

       PART VI THE LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

      16

      17

      18

      19

      20

       About the Author

       Author’s Note

       Praise

       By the Same Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

PART I

       1

      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 Angoulême 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.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

      Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting


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