Summary
Summary
Once more mining the rich past, Pulitzer Prize--winning author Michael Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures in this wonderful new novel.
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. 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 fool-hardy 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 will be much more than half the fun.
Author Notes
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 1963. He received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in English writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1987.
Chabon found success at the age of 24, when William Morrow publishing house offered him $155,000, a near-record sum, for the rights to his first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was his thesis in graduate school. After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh became a national bestseller, he began writing a series of short stories about a little boy dealing with his parents' divorce. The stories, which in part appeared in The New Yorker and G.Q., were bound together in 1991 into a volume titled A Model World and Other Stories. His other works include Wonder Boys, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, Telegraph Avenue, and Pop: Fatherhood in Pieces. In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He and Ayelet Waldman are co-editors of, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation..
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Michael Chabon - "'Cha'" as in Shea stadium, 'bon' as in Bon Jovi", as he used to explain on his website - has built a career on his lack of interest in hard-and-fast distinctions. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), his admired first novel, had little use for such terms as "gay" and "straight": if the book had a message about sexuality, he told an interviewer a few years ago, it's that "people can't be put into categories all that easily". Since then, he has been at pains to make it clear that he has a similar attitude to novelists and novels, crossing and recrossing the notional divide between "literary" fiction and genre writing. After winning a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), he became determinedly unsnooty, writing a fantasy for children, several comic-book scripts, a screenplay for a martial-arts Snow White , and another for Spider-Man 2 . Few high-end American novelists are as relaxed about being in the entertainment business. Chabon's recent prose fiction aimed at adults has been equally interested in genre. The Final Solution (2004) inserted an ageing Sherlock Holmes into a Golden Age-style mystery themed around the Holocaust; the more substantial The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) reinvented the Raymond Chandler-Ross Macdonald private-eye story in a counterfactual world in which the "frozen chosen" have ended up in Alaska rather than in Israel. In addition, he has edited two anthologies of "thrilling tales" for McSweeney's, Dave Eggers's publishing operation, and worked up a mock-scholarly bibliography for August Van Zorn, an imaginary, HP Lovecraft-like writer first mentioned in Chabon's novel Wonder Boys (1995). Van Zorn - whose output apparently includes such gems as "Whom Once We Called Our Son" and "The Screams of Very Little Men" - would probably approve of his new book. Gentlemen of the Road , which was first published as a serial in the New York Times Magazine last spring, is a self-consciously old-fashioned adventure story given a Jewish twist. The gentlemen in question are two blades for hire in the Caucasus and what's now Ukraine; the action takes place some time around 950AD. Zelikman - young, skinny, pale - is a Frankish Jew from Regensburg, a physician by training, who fights with an outsized bloodletting instrument and rides a horse called Hillel. Amram - older, bulky, dark - is an Ethiopian who thinks of himself as being Jewish, a former soldier in the Byzantine army and the owner of an axe called "Defiler of Your Mother". By chance, the two of them find themselves guarding a Khazar prince named Filaq, who's on the run from a homicidal usurper. Needless to say, assassins dog their heels, the princeling yearns to avenge his family, and our heroes are soon heading for Khazaria in order to save the day. Chabon reveals in an afterword that the book's working title was "Jews with Swords", and he's obviously enjoyed digging up a setting in which the phrase won't summon visions of "Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier", as he puts it. In this respect, the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted en masse to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, have served his purposes well. Not much is known about "the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews", as Zelikman thinks of it, but in Chabon's telling it becomes a romantic dream of Jewish history, an exotically multicultural empire soon to be overrun by Vikings from the north, as well as a backdrop for hair's-breadth escapes. From Lermontov to George MacDonald Fraser, the Caucasus has also been a useful site for derring-do, and the associations help the story along its way. All this would make Gentlemen of the Road a fun thing to get piecemeal in your Sunday paper. Yet between its beautifully-designed hard covers, it seems a bit disjointed. While Chabon's luxuriant writing is well-suited to evoking "sad-faced lean men with heroic moustaches" or snuffling up "the grandiose reek of a bearskin", it's less effective when it comes to scenes of action. The plot is neatly set up but oddly inert, and the episodic structure isn't held together with the cliffhangers MacDonald Fraser or Dumas would have thrown in. There are some pretty good jokes, and Chabon's decision to ensure that either a hat or an elephant plays a part in each key scene is mysteriously charming. But it makes the story seem a literary exercise, as do the echoes of Voltaire and Calvino and occasional tributes to Lovecraft's famously overblown vocabulary. Also, having equipped his Jews with swords, Chabon rarely lets them use the weapons. Not using them might be the point, however, because many of the book's failures to provide thrills and spills result from its success as an ironic attempt to imagine how Jewish swordsman-adventurers should behave. In some ways, it turns out, they behave as joke Jewish stereotypes: being more interested in medicine than in stabbing people, for example, or being made unfit for action by debilitating bouts of melancholy and guilt. Even so, Chabon does a good job of replacing an adventurer's sense of boundless horizons with an exile's gloomy consciousness of there being nowhere to go, "nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family". But these currents of strong feeling aren't easy to navigate when it's hard to tell what's parody, what's pastiche and what's something Chabon wants to let us know. At one point, Zelikman is hugely excited at discovering a lost manuscript, as in The Name of the Rose . Instead of Aristotle, though, it's "the De Urines of Alexander Trallianus". A nice joke, if somewhat bookish, but I found myself wishing that Chabon would always be so clear about when he is, and isn't, taking the piss. To order Gentlemen of the Road for pounds 11 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-TaylerChabon.1 Michael Chabon - "'Cha'" as in Shea stadium, 'bon' as in Bon Jovi", as he used to explain on his website - has built a career on his lack of interest in hard-and-fast distinctions. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), his admired first novel, had little use for such terms as "gay" and "straight": if the book had a message about sexuality, he told an interviewer a few years ago, it's that "people can't be put into categories all that easily". Since then, he has been at pains to make it clear that he has a similar attitude to novelists and novels, crossing and recrossing the notional divide between "literary" fiction and genre writing. After winning a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), he became determinedly unsnooty, writing a fantasy for children, several comic-book scripts, a screenplay for a martial-arts Snow White , and another for Spider-Man 2 . Few high-end American novelists are as relaxed about being in the entertainment business. - Christopher Tayler.
New York Review of Books Review
URBAN legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never happened. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical, at least in New York, and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book. In his earlier collections of clinical tales - most famously in "Awakenings" (1973) and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985) - Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul. His new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-yearold surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. Cicoria's heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. Within three months of his electrocution, Cicoria had little time for anything other than playing and composing. A dozen years later, Cicoria is still an extreme musicophiliac but has no desire to investigate his own condition with the finer-tuned forms of brain scanning that are now available. He has come to see his condition as a "lucky strike." The music in his head is, he says, "a blessing ... not to be questioned." (He was certainly lucky not to be killed. Standing in thunderstorms cannot yet be recommended as a new answer to the old question of how to get to Carnegie Hall.) Thanks to the willingness of others to be scanned, though, we now know that musicians' brains are different. The corpus callosum, which connects the brain's two hemispheres, is bigger in professional musicians. And people with absolute pitch (that is, those who can immediately name a heard note) have an asymmetric enlargement in a part of the auditory cortex. Because of this, and because of other distinctive differences in the distribution of gray matter, Sacks says that anatomists now have no difficulty in spotting the brain of a professional musician. (They cannot yet do this for the brain of a writer or visual artist.) It is not clear to what extent such marks of a musical brain are innate and to what extent they are the result of musical training and practice. But according to Sacks, these markers are strongly correlated with the age at which musical training begins and with the intensity of practice. Even with no training or practice, some unusual patients embrace music with an enthusiasm almost as intense as Cicoria's. These are people with Williams syndrome, whom Sacks calls a "hypermusical species." The syndrome is caused by a rare genetic defect that produces a strange mixture of strengths (sociability, liveliness, large vocabularies and a fondness for telling stories) and weaknesses (most have I.Q.'s under 60). They also have heart defects and distinctive faces, with wide mouths, small chins and upturned noses. All, it seems, are extremely responsive to music from an early age. Some have striking gifts of musical memory, though not all are musically talented. If music gives these individuals a joy that helps to compensate for their other disadvantages, it is little short of a lifeline for Clive Wearing. Wearing is an English musicologist and musician who contracted a severe brain infection and was left with a memory span of just a few seconds. His case is the most distressing in Sacks's collection and was featured in a BBC documentary aptly titled "Prisoner of Consciousness." With no past, not even one from a minute ago, Wearing does not really occupy a present either. "It's like being dead," he once told his wife. Although he does not remember her, he is always overjoyed to see her, continually meeting her for the first time. It is similar with his music. Asked to play a Bach prelude, he says he has never played any of them before; but then he plays one and says, while playing, that he remembers this one. In an intriguing and paradoxical conjecture, Sacks suggests that "remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all.... Listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present." Music has been used successfully as a treatment for many kinds of mental suffering. Indeed the benefits of the singing cure are more evident than those of the talking one. The first formal programs of music therapy began in the 1940s, and it is now used successfully to ameliorate the symptoms of motor and speech disorders, aphasia and several forms of dementia Sacks describes as astonishing the sight of deeply demented patients waking from their torpor or casting aside their agitation to focus on songs that are played to them. He also recounts an extreme case of Tourette's syndrome in another English musician, who was racked by nearly 40,000 compulsive tics per day. The man's life was transformed when his family got a piano. He now finds relief only when performing. Yet in rare cases, music can become a torture rather than a balm. At the end of his life, Schumann was tormented by musical hallucinations that degenerated into a single incessant note. Sacks describes a child who has been plagued by continuous involuntary music in the head from the age of 7. Such people must sometimes wish they were as unmusical as Ulysses S. Grant, who apparently claimed to know just two tunes: "One is Yankee Doodle and the other is not." Freud, despite being both Viennese and a medical man, said he was almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure from music: "Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me." In the end, Sacks's catalog of oddities sheds little systematic light on the mystery of music. He cannot be blamed for this - the science of music is still in its early days. Readers will probably be grateful that Sacks, unlike Freud, is happy to revel in phenomena that he cannot yet explain. Music is used to treat mental suffering. Indeed, the singing cure seems more beneficial than the talking one. Anthony Gottlieb podcasts for The Economist and teaches the history of ideas at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is writing a book about nothingness.