

Ladataan... The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)– tekijä: Michael Chabon
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Best Dystopias (64) » 57 lisää Favourite Books (474) Nebula Award (4) Urban Fiction (1) Noir Fiction (17) Top Five Books of 2013 (1,283) Best Crime Fiction (98) Books Read in 2019 (407) Top Five Books of 2019 (237) Top Five Books of 2018 (798) Books Read in 2017 (1,227) Great Audiobooks (22) Books Read in 2013 (291) Books Read in 2016 (3,744) Magic Realism (198) Emily's Reviews (1) Audio Books (1) Protagonists - Men (21) Speculative Fiction (32) Books About Murder (122) Murder Mysteries (8) Jewish Books (16) Detective Stories (67) Unread books (524) Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. Kind of a neat twist on gumshoe fiction. I didn't love it, but I liked it. Every time I read this I mark my Calendar for a year ahead so I can read it again. Totally engrossing. The plot is fairly straightforward hard boiled detective, but the world Chabon weaves is so complete in its reality that the plot nearly fades into the background while you explore and become familiar with the alternate world of the Alaskan Jewish diaspora. I have started this book several times but not been able to complete it until now. It is not an easy book to consume (in my case "listen to"). The book doesn't seem to be written for the readers, but to impress other authors. If there is count of "number of different words per page", this probably has twice the number of usual book. Is the author trying to impress with his use of a thesaurus? With poetry skills? I am not a fan. The book happens in an alternative universe where Israel didn't become a Jewish state and instead a large group lives in a territory in Alaska but that time is coming to an end. A lousy cop has a shot body found in his building and he gets involved. After that he is just bounced around while Chabon tries to impress on the reader, trying to use the cop as an excuse.
Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. A mobile phone is a shoyfer (perhaps because, like the ram's horn, it calls you), a gun is a sholem (a Yiddish version of a Peacemaker?). Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else. Voices are like "an onion rolling in a bucket", or rusty forks falling. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." Chabon's ornate prose makes Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain. Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it. For the most part, Chabon's writing serves the knotted mystery that is being unravelled, but there is eventually a point where it begins to weary the mind, where the elaborations of things get in the way of the things themselves and the narrative gets sucked under by style. The compulsory paragraph of Byzantine physical description whenever another character arrives on the scene starts to seem an irritating interlude; another over-reaching cadenza. Though it seems churlish to complain about such a vivid talent, a little less would have been enough already. It’s obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, unreal world is Chabon’s idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction. Some of the pleasures of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are, actually, distinctly Dan Brown–ish. Mr. Chabon often ends chapters with cliffhangers that might be tiresome in the hands of a lesser writer (say, Dan Brown). Here, they’re over-the-top suspenseful, savory and delicious. More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly piece of northern real estate, where Yiddish is the language of choice, the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman — this “secular policeman” who has learned to sail “double-hulled against tragedy,” ever wary of “the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque” that can topple a boat in the shallows. This novel makes you think, but it is an ordeal to read. The problem: Chabon has mixed two very dark story lines that jar the reader. There is the real tragedy of Sitka's wandering Jews, and then there is the faux bleakness of the noir genre with its posturing attitude. The central character comes across as a Jewish Humphrey Bogart wannabe, not a three-dimensional character who can shoulder a 400-plus-page novel about exile, fanatics and longing. Sisältyy tähän:
In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy. No library descriptions found. |
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Part detective story, part alternative history, part romance, part discussion of religious dogma, this enchanting book held my attention like the best suspenseful mystery, so that I read it almost in one sitting. What would have happened if Israel had never taken hold in 1948? What would happen if you gave a whole people a 20 year lease on which to lick their wounds? And what would happen when one kind of hope collides with another? Some of the Jews in the borrowed land of Alaska want to try to win back Palestine, some want to stay, some are fearful of eviction, again, as has happened for millenia. And in the midst of this, a chess wizard is found dead in a seedy hotel, in which a guilt-ridden police detective spends his non-working hours drinking his sorrows. The classic Chandler-esque noir plot melds perfectly with the deeper discussions to produce a book that is very hard to put down. (