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Lädt ... Yiddish Policeman's Union (Original 2007; 2007. Auflage)von Michael CHABON
Werk-InformationenDie Vereinigung jiddischer Polizisten von Michael Chabon (2007)
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. A quirky and fascinating novel with very interesting characters and setting. Definitely a good read! ( ) I got to page 68 and quit. I don't normally give stars to books I don't finish, but since this was my second try I thought I deserved the right to rate. If there was humor, I didn't get it. In fact, I didn't get a lot of what was going on or being said. And finally, upon reaching chapter 9, I felt the book was becoming disgusting. I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. (2007)(audio)Pretty good alternate universe novel about a detective in Sitka where the Jews were settled in 1948. A resident in his apartment house is murdered and he is dragged against his will into investigating this. He is not very anxious to do this as the Jew's homeland will revert to Alaska in a couple of months and then the occupants will be scattered to the winds. Turns out that the murdered man is viewed by many as the ?messiah? and was going to be used in a scheme to return to the Holy Land. I had to listen to audio book because I couldn't read this due to the yiddish idioms and numerous characters used.From Publishers Weekly[Signature]Reviewed by Jess WalterThey are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It isdeep breath nowÂ¥a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel beginsÂ¥the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against AmericaÂ¥with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize?winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noirÂ¥or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. This book juggles so many concepts at once it's hard to get mad at it when it drops some balls at the end. Although this is an alternate history it's no Harry Turtledove macro big-picture deal. The majority of the book is focused on the small and personal scale, to its advantage. The book is at its best when constructing its alien but entirely familiar Sitka Alaska, juxtaposing historical and cultural ephemera for a punchline, fleshing out both its living and dead characters and their universally shared experiences of loss, and saturating the world with a hardened melancholy that feels appropriate to both Alaskan lumberjacks and dispossessed Jews. I have a lot of thoughts about this book but I think the best and most concise thing I can say is that I found myself wanting to visit the fictional city in between chapters.
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. Ist enthalten inIst gekürzt inAuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Detektiv Meyer Landsman, ein abgetakelter Polizist in Sitka, der fiktiven Hauptstadt der Juden in Alaska, versucht den Mord an einem ehemaligen Wunderkind aufzuklären. Der neue Roman von Michael Chabon ist packender Whodunnit, Liebesgeschichte und Hommage an die Krimis der 40er Jahre uind lässt das Jiddische wieder lebendig werden
Detektiv Meyer Landsman, ein abgetakelter Polizist in Sitka, der fiktiven Hauptstadt der Juden in Alaska, versucht den Mord an einem ehemaligen Wunderkind aufzuklären. Der neue Roman von Michael Chabon ist packender Whodunnit, Liebesgeschichte und Hommage an die Krimis der 40er Jahre uind lässt das Jiddische wieder lebendig werden. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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