Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure - Rilegato

Chabon, Michael

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0385665431 ISBN 13: 9780385665438

Casa editrice: Bond Street Books, 2007

Riassunto

A rollicking saga set a thousand years ago along the ancient Silk Road, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

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.

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Recensione

“Chabon... offers an ebullient yarn that blithely defies probability, while plundering from innumerable semi-literary sources... Ridiculously entertaining. If the movie people don’t snap this one up, somebody’s asleep at the switch.” – Kirkus Reviews

“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 Road in 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

L'autore

Michael Chabon is the author of the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. His next novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, will be published by Harper Collins in May of 2007. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, a #1 bestselling young adult novel, Summerland, and has written a number of screenplays and teleplays. He writes a regular column for Details magazine. Chabon lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Bond Street Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0385665431
• ISBN 13: 9780385665438
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 224