Gentlemen of the Road: a Tale of Adventure

by Michael Chabon

book data

2,816 ratings, 3.36 average rating, 705 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		11%
4		34%
3		36%
2		13%
1		3%

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published

October 30th 2007 by Bond Street Books

details

Hardcover, 224 pages

isbn

0385665431 (isbn13: 9780385665438)

description

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and lar…more

[close] Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past, Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures—from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories—in a wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade's most tantalizing tales.

They're an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa A.D. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can—as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the gullible from their money. No strangers to tight scrapes and close shaves, they've left many a fist shaking in their dust, tasted their share of enemy steel, and made good any number of hasty exits under hostile circumstances.

None of which has necessarily prepared them to be dragooned into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire. Usurped by his brutal uncle, the callow and decidedly ill-tempered young royal burns to reclaim his rightful throne. But doing so will demand wicked cunning, outrageous daring, and foolhardy bravado . . . not to mention an army. Zelikman and Amram can at least supply the former. But are these gentlemen of the road prepared to become generals in a full-scale revolution? The only certainty is that getting there—along a path paved with warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the grandest adventures are made of—will be much more than half the fun. [close]

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Dec 04, 2008

Seizure Romero rated it:

(review of isbn 0345502078)

bookshelves: fiction

Read in December, 2008

I stole this book from my friend Krystal. Ok, not so much stole as co-opted for a few days. I see her at the coffee shop and she shows me the book she just started reading. She then starts talking to other people. Having left my book at home in a rare moment of bibliotardedness, I start reading hers. She wanders off to run errands nearby and by the time she comes back I'm a third of the way into it. She gathers her things to go and tells me, "Go ahead and finish it. I've got another book."...more

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Nov 06, 2007

lia rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in November, 2007

Michael Chabon has been making it hard for me lately, to love him in the way I'm used to doing. The Yiddish Policeman's Union was unfinishable for me, but I'm going to try again. This is something totally different however, a swashbuckling adventure story full of Turks, caravans, princes in disguise, swordfights and ruffians of many degree. He says in the afterward that he wanted to name the book "Jews With Swords" but didn't get a lot of positive feedback on that. But it made me like...more

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Oct 02, 2007

Joe rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: didn-t-finish, onhold

This is the second Michael Chabon book in a row that I gave up reading. I just couldn't get into the characters. Like in "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" one of the things that dragged me down may have been the research involved. There were so many Yiddish terms in that book I just couldn't read it without a dictionary, and in "Gentlemen of the Road" (or "Jews With Swords" as he wanted to call it) there were so many terms associated directly with life in the medieval...more

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Oct 02, 2007

Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

A rollicking book. If any book deserves the word 'rollicking', this is it. This adventure yarn draws heavily and with much love from Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard, among others. While some readers may wonder 'what's the point?', the reader who does not look for a point to everything will enjoy the ride immensely.

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7 comments

May 29, 2008

Elizabeth rated it:

(review of isbn 0340953543)

bookshelves: chocolate-club

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Elizabeth by: Tim

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Mar 26, 2008

Jeff rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: people who like elephants- but only kind of

Part I of the review:
“I want to do nothing. Nothing. Okay, maybe I’ll read a book. Hmm… Gentleman of the Road, by Michael Chabon. Well, I really liked Kavalier and Clay. And I liked Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And this is a short book- maybe I’ll just read this book, and work myself out of this 5 month funk I’ve been in…
… For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the f...more Part I of the review:
“I want to do nothing. Nothing. Okay, maybe I’ll read a book. Hmm… Gentleman of the Road, by Michael Chabon. Well, I really liked Kavalier and Clay. And I liked Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And this is a short book- maybe I’ll just read this book, and work myself out of this 5 month funk I’ve been in…
… For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.

What the hell is a ‘myna’? What’s a ‘caravansary’? Dammit- I’m reading a Michael Chabon book! Which means words I’ve never heard and… yep, there they are- Zelikman- funny Jewish names. Sigh… I want to do nothing… nothing… I really don’t even want to read this book. I don’t want to do anything. Nothing. NOTHING EVER AGAIN!”

Part II of the review:
So, yes, I have finally read this book. Okay- so I guess this was the story that Michael Chabon published over a period of time through the New York Times. I remember hearing about this and thinking, "I'd like to read that..." but it turns out a full subscription to the New York Times would cost me $350, or $245 for just weekends, and let's face it- I'm not going to pay a few hundred dollars for "All the news that's fit to print" when I can get all that same news (all the news that's fit to upload into a web browser?) for free (or for whatever internet costs- it should be free). Anyway- but this isn't about how little I care about the "paper of record" and their fancy crossword puzzles- and how I’d probably be smarter if I read that particular paper- but New York doesn’t need the ego boost of having me read their paper- this is about how I muddled through the 193 pages of Gentleman of the Road, and king of enjoyed myself while doing it.
It does read like a serialized story- which isn’t a bad thing, but every chapter did end with that cliffhanger type of feeling… or did it?

Part III of the book review.
Overall- I didn’t feel the same connections with these characters as I did with Chabon’s other characters in his other novels- but then again, he only had 200 pages to work with (whereas his other books have 400 plus pages to cram full of words that I have to look up and names that I pronounce phonetically in my head) but I still enjoyed myself reading the book. It was apparently steeped in historic Jewish culture- maybe- I wouldn’t know. There was a big deal about elephants- though- it wasn’t really a big deal. Overall I think it’s a pretty good quick read. It brought me out of my five-month-long funk. Or did it?

Part IV
I’ll say this: The ending was so-so. There was all this build-up till the end, and then it just sort of ended. It made me wonder if it being published in a newspaper had anything to do with the ending. And then there’s this weird afterward by Michael Chabon. In the afterward Chabon discusses why he wrote the book (he’s experimenting with different formats?) and then he talks about going on adventures, and there’s this big to do about ‘Jews with swords’ and then he says something that almost sounds like a backhanded compliment about people not reading books anymore… or people reading books instead of carrying swords as a way of escapism, or something like that. I could have misunderstood what he was saying, but still Dude- I just bought your freaking $22 dollar book (which is still a way better deal than the $350 newspaper subscription) stop lecturing me about being afraid of going on adventure with swords and what not. Let’s just all of us read a comic book and relax.
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Feb 13, 2008

Sophia rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: 2008, mainstreamfiction, own

Read in March, 2008

I love Chabon's writing; his characters are so real they breathe, his prose is beautiful, and he wraps you in the blanket of the magnificent tale he weaves. Unfortunately, that blanket is often so tangled even he has a hard time getting out of it. In other words, his endings drive me nuts.

At first I thought this one would be a change, since it's shorter and the story is smaller in scope. The plot and style is well-suited to him too, as it concerns the travels of two ninth century kni...more

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Dec 29, 2007

Joaquin rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in December, 2007

This was just a plain old fun book to read. The writing was excellent - very clear and evocative without being overly pretentious or here-let-me-get-my-dictionary-y. There were several times when I laughed out loud or reread a passage aloud to myself or my wife just to hear the words. In fact, I think this would be a perfect book to read aloud to or with your honey. The story itself, like the title suggests, was a standard 'two dudes go wandering and adventure/hilarity ensues.' This is an ex...more

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Dec 04, 2007

Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in December, 2007

Reading this directly after Lawrence Block's "Tanner's Twelve Swingers" was quite eye-opening. Unlike Block, who relied on flimsy flash and sex to barrel through his story, Chabon created a complex world for his two Jews with swords - a French Jew (before there was a France) who looks like a scarecrow and a giant Abyssinian black Jew who wields a battle ax called Motherfucker. Sure, it sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but with this little novel, Chabon achieves what only the best fa...more Reading this directly after Lawrence Block's "Tanner's Twelve Swingers" was quite eye-opening. Unlike Block, who relied on flimsy flash and sex to barrel through his story, Chabon created a complex world for his two Jews with swords - a French Jew (before there was a France) who looks like a scarecrow and a giant Abyssinian black Jew who wields a battle ax called Motherfucker. Sure, it sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but with this little novel, Chabon achieves what only the best fantasy stories can. His world, though immensely removed from our own (I mean, Jews with swords, how crazy can you get? (Chabon makes sure to address the anomaly in his Afterword)), seems much more real than much naturalism that purports to show modern life as it exists.

The two gentlemen of the road - Zelikman and Amram - take on a task - a quest, if you will - that rewards them less monetarily than politically, and perhaps morally - when they set out to escort a young royal to his grandfather's fortress and out of the way of the new bek's (king's) mercenaries.

The twists and turns of Chabon's tale delight in a rather light manner. This young royal isn't what he at first seems. The relationship between the two unorthodox Jews proves to be comically warm and the political climate of the Near East is much more interesting and varied than one would have thought. Chabon does a good job of showing that ages old fault line where the three masses of men - Christians, Jews, and Muslims - smash into each other with devastating consequences - not that Chabon delves too much into the conflict between the religions, but the obvious rifts are evident.

One of the more interesting political devices in the novel is the structure of the government of Atil - a great massive city-state split down the middle between the Jews and the Muslims - in which the bek rules over the lives of his subjects, but the kagan - a man who lives in a fortress on an island in the delta of Atil and never sees another soul except for his blind servant - tells the bek what to do. Sounds like Cheney and Bush.

A land of elephants, caravans, silk embroidered head gear, daggers, whores (love the whorehouse scenes), and Vikings makes this little book burst. A fun, fun read.(less)

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Aug 28, 2007

vladimir rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

recommends it for: Sword and sorcery fans; fans pulp adventure novels; swashbuckling in all its forms..

I'm rewriting my review now that the book has finally come out (read it in August as an advance); I knew it would divide fans and perplex even more.

"Gentlemen of the Road" draws from what some might call 'pulp' fiction styles, or in other cases 'adventure fiction'. The language is very much a product of these styles of writing; frankly, prose was more complex back then (not that I'm saying it was better, but it was definitely different)-- longer sentences, oddly constructed...more

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Nov 19, 2007

Tim rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: 2007reads, theroad

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: you

Okay, this book was f****** great. And for those of you who are a little slow those asterisks stand for ucking. I would give it 6 stars if I could.
Really though, this book was just excently written. It was fun, had great character development (which I think was the main thing lacking in Chabon's last novella experiment, The Final Solution), and of course a great story with unexpected turns and an excellent ending.
I've seen that some other people have written lesser reviews and I'm...more

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Dec 24, 2007

Tim rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: contemporary-fiction, mediocre-as-a-frozen-pizza, never-completely-finished, not-as-good-as-everyone-says

Read in July, 2008

I didn't want to believe the negative reviews when I started this book. I'm a big fan of Michael Chabon and have been impressed with his writing. However, this novel seems to tread the line of wanting to be literary fiction or pulp adventure fiction as a result it fails at both.

The novel is bland and empty. Things happen and there is a fast pace at times, but I didn't care. That's the first for a Chabon novel. I don't care about any characters or what happens to them.

...more

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Aug 18, 2007

Stephanie rated it:

(review of isbn 0340953543)

Read in November, 2007

I should mark this book "partially read and discarded." I was bored with this so-called adventure story. It was a disappointment, considering that I have like most of Chabon's other works, including Summerland. I can see the model of the boy's adventure story that Chabon is trying to adhere to, but the story lacks the drama and the pacing that make such a story exciting to read. Ostensibly those elements are there -- but it didn't grab me. This might be what happens when a writer ...more

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Jun 07, 2009

Jeremy rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: modern-fiction

Read in June, 2009

Rich setting, but in the end, all flash, no fire. Chabon is brave for trying an adventure novel, but I'd say that's the best extent of the adventure.

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Dec 17, 2007

Kellan rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read the books for the afterwords. The book is amusing, but slight. Chabon's meditations in the afterwords on the nature of adventure, identity, and the writing process are worth the price of admission. (though his protests as "I'm not a genre fiction writer, no really" are amusingly flimsy)

Additionally this is a book which would be greatly enhanced by being a hyperlinked document, backed by a rich wikipedia-esque data store. Rather then suffer I think the option t...more

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Dec 29, 2007

James rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: fans of chabon or jews with swords

It took a while to get into this book--I feel like I have a pretty strong vocabulary, but I had to go to the dictionary every other page at first. However, it became clear that this was not because I'm not amazingly smart (obviously) but rather because Chabon kept drawing on archaic terms relating to the governments, games, and weapons of 10th century muslims...once google helped me figure out what the hell beks, shatranj, and kagans were, I found a very entertaining little story. If you have ...more

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Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine added it (review of isbn 0345501748)

Gentlemen of the Road, compared by the New York Times Book Review to "the stories found in 19th-century dime novels and the fantastic escapades invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard," was first published in serial form in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Critics quickly pointed out the telltale signs of the multiple-installment format: new characters, settings, and plot twists in every chapter, which result in a fast, sometimes confusing, pace. Chabon's lush, memorab

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Feb 05, 2009

Katya Zelevinsky rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

bookshelves: historical-fiction

Read in January, 2009

In the afterword for this book, Michael Chabon said that his working, half tongue-in-cheek title for the book was Jews With Swords, and that every time he told this title to his friends, they always laughed, picturing in their heads someone who looked like Woody Allen waving a sword around. This book feels like a response to all those people who laughed at the title, and a warning against the danger of stereotyping a whole people in such a way -- it's a dashing tale of swashbuckling and adventur...more

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Dec 02, 2007

Evan rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Charming tale of adventure, all the promise of a serialized penny dreadful fulfilled by a first rate writer like Chabon. For such a short piece, I fell in love with the characters.

Marred by a curiously hostile afterward which chastises the reader for thinking that adventure tales are frivolous, though such readers are the least likely to reach the end of the book. It is clear that Chabon has moved on from the "late twentieth century realism genre" as he calls it, and that...more

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Jan 24, 2010

Dot rated it:

(review of isbn 0345501748)

Read in January, 2010

What an interesting author! I listened to this on audio and it was well read, though I did get lost a few times in the beginning, mostly because what I was reading was unexpected, but more often because I kept falling asleep. This is an adventure story set in the 10th century and the protagonists roam from the Middle East to the Caucasus. One is a Jewish physician, the other an African hustler and together they hustle their way through many adventures, including toppling a usurper from a thro...more

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