The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon, author of my beloved Kavalier and Clay, the book which was totally on sale at a huge book fair this weekend and was taken right from beneath my nose so I STILL DON'T OWN A COPY OF IT GURGGHHH. Anyway, I happened to see this book at the local library and I was all, oh hey, loved your other book, hook me up.

Well, it's set in Sitka (Shiksa?), Alaska which was apparently colonized by Jews as a safe haven after/during the Holocaust and after Israel's collapse... but Alaska wants to reclaim it... and also it's a whodunit, because this guy was murdered, this supposed prodigy of the generation (I can't remember the Yiddish phrase, sorry) but got overcome by the pressure and also did heroin. And the main character is of course Landsman, the inspector on the case and his ex-wife is his overseer and there's so much tension between them you could cut it the way you would cut a watermelon with a katana:

(This what we do on Friday nights.) Anyway, let's get right down to it, shall we?

"'You know the expression 'a broken man'?... Most people it gets applied to don't really deserve it... Most men, in my opinion, they have nothing there to break in the first place. But this Lasker. He was like one of those sticks you snap, it lights up. You know? For a few hours. And you can hear broken glass rattling inside of it'" (3). Lasker was the murdered man. This... Well, I've been wracking my brain to think of how this would describe someone, and in Lasker's case it works--he was this child prodigy. Supposedly, of every generation, a possible Messiah is born. This was the kid. He had performed miracles (supposedly), he had an IQ of about 200, he was really good at chess (which is apparently pivotal for the book's existence, but I could have cared less)--that would be when he glowed. But the pressure got to him and he kind of disappeared, became estranged, got addicted to heroin, and later got shot. So okay, at the end of the book, what was said makes sense. But at the beginning I didn't understand it.

"'Who died?' 'A yid in a predicament,' Berko tells him. 'Dog bites man'" (67). That is, it's run of the mill, the usual. Men are always biting dogs, yids are always getting killed? Oh. Was it even necessary for me to clarify? I felt it was, but that's probably just because of my journalism class with Heidi Awesome-Miller. We learned about Dog Bites Man/Man Bites Dog. (That is, report on the unusual, which would obviously be the second option.)

Oh, what I did learn from this book? Apparently the Greeks had a goddess of chess. Caissa. Oh, but actually she was invented during the Renaissance? What? You can't just make up goddesses and say they're Greek. That's cheating. And look at this picture! Zero percent of it makes sense. Zero. Mostly nude, gonna take a bath... oh, what's that strange thing, just chilling in the wilderness? I think I'll teach myself how to play it! Oh, okay. Sounds good.

"'You don't want to redeem the world?'... 'I guess I got over it,' she says, but Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman" (169).

"'My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with" (189). Hehe.

One of the worst things in this book is Chabon's overuse of metaphors and similes. Some of them are very colorful and interesting, but after 400 some-odd pages, it really wears thin. Near the very end he compares crouching people to dwarves hammering away or something. Like, what? No, Chabon, just no. Stop stop stop.

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I honestly don't have much to say about this book. I enjoyed very little of it other than what I quoted (and let's face it, even the worst books are quotable, unless if Sarah Dessen or Stephanie Meyer wrote it) and the cover, which is very intricate and cool. The coolest part is the bottom left corner (so far as I know, only one cover exists for this book, whether the edition is hardcover or softcover) which has a gun with parenthesis encompassing the bullets atop where the bullets would go in, then parenthesis around the whole gun (these kind of parenthesis {, they're intended to be like, which are my favorite kinds of parenthesis) and a talking bubble coming from the gun's uh, muzzle? (the part the bullets come out of) with a skull on it. Then, that entire box is in another parenthesis, as all together, they are COD. But. The book itself. It was uninteresting, opaque, and tiresome. Disappointingly different from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Supposedly--according to my source of Robby D--Michael Chabon just churns this stuff out, that he's the Stephen King of his niche, so it's no real surprise that this one sucks, because well, he's just churning it out. Stephen King writes crappy books all the time. And I mean, maybe it's because I don't like chess or something. Chess sucks. I actually don't even know how to play. It's definitely a MENSA-person game, though. And seeing as I'm clearly not in MENSA...

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Uh, yeah, that's it, I guess.

Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Oscar Wilde by Company of Thieves

This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Even if the cancer grows till we explode, I'm yours

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Also, current events: Can't find my copy of Holes by Louis Sachar. Seriously enraged. That book's only the mayor of Awesometown, no biggie.