The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Under Kornblum’s tutelage, Josef began to learn the rigorous trade of the Ausbrecher from the lips of one of its masters. At the age of fourteen, he had decided to consecrate himself to a life of timely escape.

“What?” Sammy said. “What are you thinking?” “I wish he was real,” said Joe, suddenly ashamed of himself. Here he was, free in a way that his family could only dream of, and what was he doing with his freedom? Walking around talking and making up a lot of nonsense about someone who could liberate no one and nothing but smudgy black marks on a piece

In addition to the rabbis, there were studies of organ-grinders, soldiers in breastplates, a beautiful girl in a headscarf, in various attitudes and activities. There were buildings and carriages, street scenes. It didn’t take Sammy long to recognize the spiky elaborate towers and crumbling archways of what must be Prague, lanes of queer houses hud

Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his

At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left.

But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn’t suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew

It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.

“A comic book novel,” Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and movin

He always looked as if he had not dressed for work that morning so much as gotten into some kind of altercation with his suit, shirt, and tie.