feel it sweeping over land
Yesterday, on my train ride out here, I read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. I highly, highly recommend it. It's a rollicking good read featuring swordfights, torture, revenge, comedy, and elephants. Also, Amram and Zelikman, the titular gentlemen of the road, are hetero life partners at least and ridiculously slashy at best, if that's the sort of thing that blows up your skirt. They're also swindlers and horse thieves and philosophers of a sort.
I love Chabon's prose and this book proves no exception. And while it's shorter than Kavalier and Clay or Yiddish Policemen's Union, it's no less complicated (I occasionally had trouble following all the political machinations, though I was also reading at a pretty rapid clip), and it doesn't fizzle out at the end the way Kavalier and Clay did.
It's a road trip novel of the picaresque sort, with Zelikman and Amram as the Hope and Crosby of the 10th century. Yes, it takes place in around 960 C.E. Also, did I mention? there are elephants. And swordfights. And swindles. And Amram's mighty axe (this is not a euphemism).
Also, Filaq is a woman! Which I had regrettably been spoiled for, so it didn't have the same impact for me, but she's pretty awesome.
rachelmanija has a review here, which is what moved me to pick the book up (it'd been on my list, because I like Chabon, but I didn't realize it was a swashbuckler. I do love a good swashbuckler.) As she says in her post, I would have kept reading if the book had kept going, because I enjoyed it a lot.
Right now, I am eating some fantastically sweet cantaloupe and drinking an iced coffee, and later this afternoon, I have another family bbq to attend, this one at my brother's.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/213980.html.
people have commented there.
I love Chabon's prose and this book proves no exception. And while it's shorter than Kavalier and Clay or Yiddish Policemen's Union, it's no less complicated (I occasionally had trouble following all the political machinations, though I was also reading at a pretty rapid clip), and it doesn't fizzle out at the end the way Kavalier and Clay did.
It's a road trip novel of the picaresque sort, with Zelikman and Amram as the Hope and Crosby of the 10th century. Yes, it takes place in around 960 C.E. Also, did I mention? there are elephants. And swordfights. And swindles. And Amram's mighty axe (this is not a euphemism).
Also, Filaq is a woman! Which I had regrettably been spoiled for, so it didn't have the same impact for me, but she's pretty awesome.
rachelmanija has a review here, which is what moved me to pick the book up (it'd been on my list, because I like Chabon, but I didn't realize it was a swashbuckler. I do love a good swashbuckler.) As she says in her post, I would have kept reading if the book had kept going, because I enjoyed it a lot.
Right now, I am eating some fantastically sweet cantaloupe and drinking an iced coffee, and later this afternoon, I have another family bbq to attend, this one at my brother's.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/213980.html.
people have commented there.