After reading the (pretty good) Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, I found out this earlier book had won a Pullitzer prize for fiction and decided to give it a go. Which lasted for weeks as I found the book very slow paced, to the point of always falling asleep within a few pages. The pace sort of accelerated in the second half, sort of coïnciding with Pearl Harbour and the formal entry of the United States of America into the war. At the beginning it felt too much like a transposition of my former read and despite the multiple covariates with a positive coefficient (comics, Prague, the golem, Rosa Luxemburg, New York City, the silliness of the superhero concept, esp. when repeated week after week, the ambivalence of the very notion as well, when considering the closeness between Supermen and Hitler’s Übermensch), I had a hard time engaging with the story. Maybe due to the lengthy sentences and descriptions which, as I read later in a review, were intended to supplement the absence of visual representations that (obviously) come with a graphical novel. Maybe due to the millefeuille of literary styles and fields and of parallel stories with a myriad of characters and places.
“Besotted with language and brimming with pop culture, political relevance and bravura storytelling…” The New York Times
I clearly am a minority in enjoying the book so little. The Guardian put it within its 100 best books of the 21st Century. If in the second half. And so did the New York Times. In its 16th position. There is even a (inactive) website on the book! Actually, the massive injection within the actual history of America and Europa at these most tragic times makes the novel an epic, helped with a witty and mostly understated humour. There are indeed lots of actual facts and characters, the book deeply digs into the history of the time. While indirect snapshots of the unrolling Holocaust are ghastly, Both the sinking of the orphan boat (presumably inspired by the all too real attack on the City of Benares) and the Antarctica part during WW II are sheer fiction (despite a long-going myth of Nazi bases there). But a compelling part of the novel, paradoxically.
