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Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure Gebundene Ausgabe – 30. Oktober 2007
Michael Chabon (Autor) Finden Sie alle Bücher, Informationen zum Autor und mehr. Siehe Suchergebnisse für diesen Autor |
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Gebundenes Buch, 30. Oktober 2007 |
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| 177,00 € | — |
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Gentlemen of the Road is set in the Kingdom of Arran, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950. It tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soul mates, variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves, and flimflam artists–until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles following a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars. Hired as escorts for a fugitive prince, they quickly find themselves half-willing generals in a mad rebellion, struggling to restore the prince’s family to the throne. As their increasingly outrageous exploits unfold, they encounter a wondrous elephant, wily Rhandanite tradesman, whores, thieves, soldiers, an emperor, and the truth about their young royal charge, whose slender frame conceals a startling secret and a warrior’s heart.
- Seitenzahl der Print-Ausgabe224 Seiten
- SpracheEnglisch
- HerausgeberBond Street Books
- Erscheinungstermin30. Oktober 2007
- Abmessungen14.35 x 2.44 x 20.93 cm
- ISBN-100385665431
- ISBN-13978-0385665438
Produktbeschreibungen
Pressestimmen
“Slyly entertaining. . . . Altogether enjoyable and thought-provoking. . . Chabon . . . is a marvelously gifted writer who brings to his work not only an unself-conscious mastery of technique but also a knowing intelligence born of deep and fearless reading. He has impeccable literary fiction credentials, which give him the street cred to treat genre fiction such as Gentlemen of the Roadin the same way he treats all of his books’ characters: with respect but not piety… There’s a great deal of smart and sophisticated enjoyment to be had from Gentlemen of the Road.” — Los Angeles Times
“Gleeful. . . . The plot and voice of Gentlemen of the Road recall the stories found in 19th-century dime novels and the fantastic escapades invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. Gary Gianni’s drawings highlight particularly thrilling moments, and with chapter titles like “On the Observance of the Fourth Commandment Among Horse Thieves” . . . Chabon works old-fashioned niceties into a postmodern pastiche. The action is intricate and exuberant.” — The New York Times
“It’s tiny but overstuffed, and like a battered piece of antique luggage covered with exotic stickers, it’s more interesting for what it reveals about the owner’s hunger to discover new places than for its actual contents… The snack-sized epic . . . combines Chabon’s keen, inventive approach to questions of Jewish identity, bravery, and displacement with his taste for degraded forms.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Probably the premiere prose stylist — the Updike — of his generation. . . . Chabon is still a literary novelist, but he’s having a hot, star-crossed flirtation with the ‘popular’ genres. He riffs on them, toys with them, steals their best tricks, passes them notes in class, etc. In Gentlemen of the Road . . . he achieves something like consummation. He goes all the way.” — Time
“Extraordinary adventures unfold; there’s bloodshed, violence, pillage and plunder, elephants play a crucial role and nothing is what it seems. Every page holds a twist, while the prose is rich, but perfect in its control and its calibration between the poetic and the exotic. . . . The book has a melancholy heart while its allegorical echoes are at once hard-nosed, wishful and fantastic (and all the more powerful for that). With its allusive glances here at Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, there at Don Quixote, its soaring storytelling and subtle resonances with contemporary history, readers might feel that they have reached the book equivalent of the Promised Land.” — The Times
“This book is full of dry, sophisticated humour.” — Globe and Mail
Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
On Discord Arising from the Excessive Love of a Hat
For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve. Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn, and in the stew of chickpeas, carrots, dried lemons and mutton for which the caravansary was renowned, the African held the place nearest the fire, his broad back to the bird, with a view of the doors and the window with its shutters thrown open to the blue dusk. On this temperate autumn evening in the kingdom of Arran in the eastern foothills of the Caucasus, it was only the two natives of burning jungles, the African and the myna, who sought to warm their bones. The precise origin of the African remained a mystery. In his quilted gray bambakion with its frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his buskins suggested a sojourn in the West. No one had hazarded to discover whether the speech of the known empires, khanates, emirates, hordes and kingdoms was intelligible to him. With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel’s, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions. Among the travelers at the caravansary there was a moment of admiration, therefore, for the bird’s temerity when it seemed to declare, in its excellent Greek, that the African consumed his food in just the carrion-scarfing way one might expect of the bastard offspring of a bald-pated vulture and a Barbary ape.
For a moment after the insult was hurled, the African went on eating, without looking up from the shatranj board, indeed without seeming to have heard the remark at all. Then, before anyone quite understood that calumny so fine went beyond the powers even of the myna, and that the bird was innocent, this once, of slander, the African reached his left hand into his right buskin and, in a continuous gesture as fluid and unbroken as that by which a falconer looses his fatal darling into the sky, produced a shard of bright Arab steel, its crude hilt swaddled in strips of hide, and sent it hunting across the benches.
Neither the beardless stripling who was sitting just to the right of its victim, nor the one-eyed mahout who was the stripling’s companion, would ever forget the dagger’s keening as it stung the air. With the sound of a letter being sliced open by an impatient hand, it tore through the crown of the wide-brimmed black hat worn by the victim, a fair-haired scarecrow from some fogbound land who had ridden in, that afternoon, on the Tiflis road. He was a slight, thin-shanked fellow, gloomy of countenance, white as tallow, his hair falling in two golden curtains on either side of his long face. There was a rattling twang like that of an arrow striking a tree. The hat flew off the scarecrow’s head as if registering his surprise and stuck to a post of the daub wall behind him as he let loose an outlandish syllable in the rheumy jargon of his homeland.
In the fireplace a glowing castle of embers subsided to ash. The mahout heard the iron ticking of a kettle on the boil in the kitchen. The benches squeaked, and travelers spat in anticipation of a fight.
The Frankish scarecrow slipped out from under his impaled hat and unfolded himself one limb at a time, running his fingers along the parting in his yellow hair. He looked from the African to the hat and back. His cloak, trousers, hose and boots were all black, in sharp contrast with the pallor of his soft hands and the glints of golden whisker on his chin and cheeks, and if he was not a priest, then he must, thought the mahout, for whom a knowledge of men was a necessary corollary to an understanding of elephants, be a physician or an exegete of moldering texts. The Frank folded his arms over his bony chest and stood taking the African’s measure along the rule of his bony nose. He wore an arch smile and held his head at an angle meant to signify a weary half-amusement like that which plagued a philosophical man when he contemplated this vain human show. But it was apparent to the old mahout even with his one eye that the scarecrow was furious over the injury to his hat. His funereal clothes were of rich stuff, free of travel stains, suggesting that he maintained their appearance, and his own, with fierce determination.
The Frank reached two long fingers and a thumb into the wound in his hat, grimaced and with difficulty jerked out the dagger from the post. He turned the freed hat in his hands, suppressing the urge to stroke it, it seemed to the mahout, the way he himself would stroke the stubbled croup of a beloved dam as she expired. With an air of incalculable gravity, as if confiding the icon of a household god, the Frank passed the hat to the stripling and carried the dagger across the room to the African, who had long since returned to his bowl of stew.
“I believe, sir,” the Frank informed the African, speaking again in good Byzantine Greek, “that you have mislaid the implement required for the cleaning of your hooves.” The Frank jabbed the point of the dagger down into the table beside the shatranj board, jostling the pieces. “If I am mistaken as to the actual nature of your lower extremities, I beg you to join me in the courtyard of this house, at your leisure but preferably soon, so that, with the pedagogical instrument of your choice, you may educate me.”
The Frank waited. The one-eyed mahout and the stripling, wondering, waited. By the door to the inn yard, where the ostler leaned, whispered odds were laid and taken, and the mahout heard the clink of coins and the squeak of a chalk wielded by the ostler, a Svan who disdained the distinction between turning a profit from seeing to the comfort of his guests and that of turning one from watching them die.
“I’m sorry to report,” the African said, rising to his feet, his head brushing the beams of the sloping roof, speaking in the lilting, bastardized Greek used among the mercenary legions of the emperor at Constantinople, “that my hearing shares in the general decay of the broken-down black-assed old wreck you see before you.”
The African yanked the shard of Arab steel from the table and with it went in search of the Frank’s voice box, ending his quest no farther from the pale knuckle of the Frank’s throat than the width of the blade itself. The Frank fell back, bumping into a pair of Armenian wool factors at whom he glared as if it were some clumsiness of theirs and not his cowardly instinct for self-preservation that had cost him his footing.
“But I take your gist,” the African said, returning the dagger to his boot. On the ostler’s slate the odds began to run heavily against the Frank.
The African restored the shatranj board and pieces to a leather pouch, wiped his lips and then pushed past the Frank, past the craning heads along the benches and went out into the inn yard to kill or be killed by his insulter. As the men trooped after him into the torch-lit courtyard, carrying cups of wine, wiping their bearded chins on their forearms, the weapons belonging to the combatants were fetched from a rack in the stable.
If because of...
Produktinformation
- Herausgeber : Bond Street Books (30. Oktober 2007)
- Sprache : Englisch
- Gebundene Ausgabe : 224 Seiten
- ISBN-10 : 0385665431
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385665438
- Abmessungen : 14.35 x 2.44 x 20.93 cm
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 5,315,991 in Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Bücher)
- Nr. 1,767,276 in Literatur & Fiktion
- Nr. 3,754,573 in Fremdsprachige Bücher
- Kundenrezensionen:
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Chabon is one of the finest and most original voices in contemporary literature and what makes him outstanding is that he tells stories in a way nobody else could. In almost all of his work there are references to his Jewish heritage (in my humble opinion most outstanding in his Yiddish Policemen Union) and you cannot tell a simple adventure story when the protagonists are (like his original title was) Jews with Swords. You must put it into perspective and that is what Chabon tries. I had fun reading this and I liked the subtle characterization of the personnel. Of course this is not the language of R.L. Stevenson, but that is all what Chabon is about. If you want to read an intelligent and fun story about "adventure" written by a person who knows that the Shoah actually has happened you are just right here.
Seine Bücher sind sehr interessant und unterhaltsam geschrieben.
Hat man einmal angefangen zu lesen, möchte man das Buch nicht mehr aus der Hand legen.
To me, an adventure story needs to focus on the action and move rapidly. I want to find myself hanging over a cliff without first realizing that I'm barreling towards it. Otherwise, I don't feel like I'm in the adventure . . . but merely reading words about someone's idea of an adventure.
As a result, I wasn't pleased with the results of Michael Chabon's imaginative series of 15 short stories. I was spending more time studying the language than I was thinking about the story. It's like having a cake that's almost all icing. Why? For some reason, he chooses to use extremely long sentences ("With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel's, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions.") and many infrequently used words (the first chapter includes "shatranj," "bambakion," "buskins," "ostler," "bodkin," "runes," "Mehr," "Varangian," "caravansary," "japery," "Parthian," and "mendacious." Now I knew all but one of those words and could figure the other one out from context, but I doubt if most people would agree that those words added to the meaning of the story.
Building a tale from 15 short stories also makes the book choppy. I would have preferred a novella or a novel. Few have written this way since the time of Dickens when books were sold by installment. There's a reason for that: It doesn't work as well.
But the historical references were interesting, ones that I'm glad I learned from reading the book.
It's a short book and well illustrated. Without the illustrations, I would have liked the book a lot less well. The illustrations, however, pointed out some of the weaknesses of the writing: You need the illustrations to complete the story telling for the words are inadequate by themselves.
Beyond that, was I glad I read the book? Not very much. The overall story is one that didn't capture my interest very much. After Chapter One, the book was all downhill for me.
This work feels like a writing exercise rather than a serious literary work designed to please a large audience.
If you like fine writing and don't care much about how well the story works, by all means read this book.
But if you are looking for the best and most accessible of what Michael Chabon can deliver, skip Gentlemen of the Road.
To me, an adventure story needs to focus on the action and move rapidly. I want to find myself hanging over a cliff without first realizing that I'm barreling towards it. Otherwise, I don't feel like I'm in the adventure . . . but merely reading words about someone's idea of an adventure.
As a result, I wasn't pleased with the results of Michael Chabon's imaginative series of 15 short stories. I was spending more time studying the language than I was thinking about the story. It's like having a cake that's almost all icing. Why? For some reason, he chooses to use extremely long sentences ("With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel's, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions.") and many infrequently used words (the first chapter includes "shatranj," "bambakion," "buskins," "ostler," "bodkin," "runes," "Mehr," "Varangian," "caravansary," "japery," "Parthian," and "mendacious." Now I knew all but one of those words and could figure the other one out from context, but I doubt if most people would agree that those words added to the meaning of the story.
Building a tale from 15 short stories also makes the book choppy. I would have preferred a novella or a novel. Few have written this way since the time of Dickens when books were sold by installment. There's a reason for that: It doesn't work as well.
But the historical references were interesting, ones that I'm glad I learned from reading the book.
It's a short book and well illustrated. Without the illustrations, I would have liked the book a lot less well. The illustrations, however, pointed out some of the weaknesses of the writing: You need the illustrations to complete the story telling for the words are inadequate by themselves.
Beyond that, was I glad I read the book? Not very much. The overall story is one that didn't capture my interest very much. After Chapter One, the book was all downhill for me.
This work feels like a writing exercise rather than a serious literary work designed to please a large audience.
If you like fine writing and don't care much about how well the story works, by all means read this book.
But if you are looking for the best and most accessible of what Michael Chabon can deliver, skip Gentlemen of the Road.
Spitzenrezensionen aus anderen Ländern
Read it. You'll like it. Another one of those novels which helps you to imagine "what it was like then". And chuckles all the way.