Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure | 
|  | | | Title: | Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure | | Author: | Michael Chabon | | Publisher: | Del Rey | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 30 October, 2007 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0345501748 / 9780345501745 | | List Price: | $21.95 | | You Save: | $7.02 | | Amazon Price: | $14.93 | |
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Short, But Sweet... 30 October, 2008
...just like this review.
If you love language...if you love adventure-writ-economical...if you believe that 'less is more'...then this novel is for you.
It's not for everyone. It is a sortakinda set-piece of muscular language; imagine if you will, Shakespeare writing a novella, and doing it with brevity in mind. It presumes that you're either familiar with many/most/the majority of arcane references...or you have the mental chops to connect the dots, to keep up with alacrity...while having a ball.
Having said that, as a screenwriter/novelist, part of my reaction to any book is, at the risk of infuriating literary purists, to ask the question 'Would it make a good movie?'
'Gentlemen of the Road' would make (in the right hands, with the right touch) a fantabulous film.
My fingers are now crossed.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A296VPC2WT0JQ5
• Where's My Award For Finishing This? 03 November, 2008
Chabon's language winds and wends in so many different directions; I found it both beautiful and headache-inducing. The novel is about two unlikely friends - Amram, the giant African, and Zelikman, the scarecrow from Francia. They are, indeed, "gentlemen of the road," going where the wind and fortune take them. Early in the book they get caught up in the affairs of an embattled royal bent on revenge and reclamation of the family throne. The storyline is peppered with a high body count (though none of it is grisly) and plenty of clever revelations to make the story interesting. I found the two main characters charming and complex, though the dense writing style still kept them at arm's length from me.
I felt like I earned something while reading this book - it really was that difficult for me to process (and it's only 196 pages!). I can't put my finger on what made it so hard, or why I enjoyed it so much. I read the author's afterword, and even in a more conversational tone, I found Chabon diffult to "follow." My husband read and enjoyed his young adult novel Summerland, and his Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay has been recommended to be by many people. Even though I often felt confused in the maze of this book's language, I know I'll eventually give Chabon another try.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AHVXFU25YRSMV
• Chabon Elevates Genre Fiction 27 October, 2008
Michael Chabon is the undisputed master of rasing genre novels into (or nearly into) the realm of literature. "Gentlemen of the Road" was originally produced as a serialized adventure, published incrementally by the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
It shows.
But as always, Chabon makes a convincing argument that we should overlook what we would normally think of as a failing. The adventures of a pair of Jewish con-men/mercenaries in 10th-century Khazaria feels like a very good mini-series on a channel like A&E or The BBC. Rousing action, battles and barfights, love and deceptions, politics and revolution packaged intelligently with quality actors and wrapped in Chabon's wonderful prose. While the chapters are at times disjointed, "Gentlemen of the Road" makes for an entertaining whole.
The depth and seriousness of "Kavalier & Clay" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is replaced with swashbuckling heroes and the dust and mist of history, allowing the reader to relax and enjoy following Zelikman and Amram, a classic pair of bickering opposites, in their trip across an ancient and little known landscape.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A13VWZFCTJQLHK
• Chabon Lite 16 September, 2008
More in the vein of Chabon's Summerland than his more serious work, Gentlemen of the Road is, withall, a delightful read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AYKMP6WYQ7YYL
• I Expected More. I Got Less 12 October, 2008
Going by the glowing reviews and recommendations, I thought I would be getting a breathtaking adventure that would keep me up at night as I just HAD to know what happened next. Hardly. While I will give kudos to author Chabon for setting his story in a part of the world we Westerners don't often get to read about, I would have liked to have gotten more involved in the setting. Learned more about the area, it's people and history. But because of the brevity of the book (more novella than novel) there wasn't time. Nor did I form any attachment to the cookie-cutout heroes Zelikman or Amram. My biggest complaint was it was SO predictable. I knew what twists and turns were coming. I knew what was going to happen before I turned the page. I was disappointed with the whole thing.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A23AA5C8I38P33
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