The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.”

“The pins have voices,” he reminded Josef at last. “The pick is a tiny telephone wire. The tips of your fingers have ears.”

Hofzinser. It was a private men’s club, housed in a former inn on one of the Stare Mesto’s most crooked and crepuscular streets, which combined the functions of canteen, benevolent society, craft guild, and rehearsal hall for the performing magicians of Bohemia.

The night was moonless, and a fog lay over the river like an arras drawn across by a conjuror’s hand.

this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague.

“feat of autoliberation”

it struck them both afterward as having been something calm and leisurely, like the murmurs between them that sometimes preceded sleep.

one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

“Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”

Harry Houdini, who made frequent, expert use of disguise in his lifelong crusade to gull and expose false mediums.

There was a residuum of summer in the watery blue sky, in the floral smell issuing from the bare throats of passing women.

exophthalmic

As they proceeded, a unanimous silence seeped from the walls of the stairwell and hallways, as stifling as a smell.

leaving Josef to the warmth of her goose-down counterpane, the lilac smell of her nape and cheek lingering on the cool pillow, the perfumed darkness of her bedroom, the shame of his contentment.

A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations.

imperturbability

“People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

Its cold clay flesh seemed to give slightly under the pressure of fingertips, and a narrow range of motion, perhaps the faintest memory of play, inhered in the elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker’s doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips.

She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose.

He was flattered, and believed in his father, and in the potency of long walks.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.

was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life.

he learned to trouble over the emotional occasion, so to speak, of a panel, choosing carefully, among the infinitude of potential instants to arrest and depict, the one in which the characters’ emotions were most extreme.

It was like a noseful of wine that he could not drink; yet it intoxicated him.

Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop

“Well, there are just so many. I’d lose track.” “Airplane Dream #13” told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it—there was a kind of graphic “sound track” constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery—but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.

impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated π. In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.

The Book of Lo was the sacred book of the ancient and mysterious Cimmerians. Last year—as was widely reported at the time—this legendary text, long since given up for lost, turned up in the back room of an old wine cellar downtown. It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather case encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, devoted to the strange particulars of the worship of the great Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo.

the shattered chrysalis of her old life,

fly in darkness but always to seek the light.

striking out toward the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised.

that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

the day enveloped him in a pleasant confusion of aches and images like the one that overwhelms someone on the verge of sleep who has spent the entire day out of doors.

An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life.

They draw a line, mark a point, that is present nowhere in the creation they purport to reflect and explain.