Michael Chabon's way of writing science fiction completely redefined the genre for me. After reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay --- which, regrettably, I thought I hated at first because of its flowery language --- the book took over my thoughts from the time I began it to weeks after I'd finished. I couldn't stop thinking about how Chabon depicted grief, how he was able to have the reader feeling hopeful alongside the characters, feeling alone, holding their breath for the other shoe to drop. When I found that the Buffalo library system housed so many of his other books, I was ecstatic. I picked up The Yiddish Policemen's Union and dropped the book I was reading at the time to focus on this one alone; in some sense, I was hoping for some kind of barely altered replica of Kavalier and Clay, chasing the same kind of catharsis that his other book had offered me.
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/ This, of course, was not the case. I found that I could not stumble through The Yiddish Policeman's Union like I had for Kavalier and Clay; most often, I had to stop reading at least once each chapter to look at a map of Alaska, or pull up a Wikipedia article for a Yiddish word I did not recognize and could not hazard a guess for that would not compromise the integrity of the narrative. This was initially frustrating. I hate how much Chabon's writing exposes what little I know about other places, other religions, and other cultures. In retrospect, this isn't a bad thing at all. As the story progressed, my curiosity grew for the history of Alaska, for the Jewish diaspora and their whereabouts after World War II, for things I did not understand and for things I had never even thought of before. I even picked up chess again, after the book implanted a sense of nostalgia in me for the game I resolved to never play again when my father tried to teach me at eight.
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/ On top of this, Michael Chabon's use of figurative language never fails to amaze me. In no other book I had read before does the author describe a beard as "bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence", or houses "jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits". I couldn't get enough. I looked forward to every line I read.
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/ However, I still can't bring myself to give the book five stars. It may be my own fault for not understanding the ending and its layered meanings, but the helplessness overpowering the ending still leaves me disappointed. In the book, Landsman, the Jewish detective "privately" investigating the case of a murdered Messiah, chases loose threads to borderline fatal corners of Alaska and narrowly escapes each time with one more small piece to the puzzle. Each time, the reader gets another small glimpse into a thrilling story being unraveled by the character who seems to have either the worst or the best luck in the world. Every story beat was wonderfully paced, in my opinion, until the ending.
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/ I don't understand why Landsman's sister's death is left as something that couldn't be helped, as if she was only a prop to tie Landsman to his case on a more personal level. The killer had no intention to get away with the murder so smoothly, and because the reader sees and knows so little of him, the reveal feels sloppy and unsatisfying. Landsman repeatedly gets assists and confessions from people I thought hated him (rightfully), and above all, in the end, I can't understand why his ex-wife thought to invite him into her life again. She seemed like she was doing fine --- better, even --- without him, as the reader knows, causing trouble at every turn he takes.
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/ Perhaps this ending was meant to parallel Sitka's Jews returning to the Holy Land and a reversion to a "natural", human order of things, of war and violence, of tethering yourself to a home that is hostile, or of looking aimlessly to a sanctuary that millions of homesick followers fought so viciously over for thousands of years that it's hard to tell if its a wasteland now or still a temple. Does it have to be true that Jerusalem has to have more blood shed on its land for Jewish people to finally have a home? Does it have to be true that Landsman has to win his wife back for him to not jump in front of every threat he half hopes will kill him? In the book, Landsman even abandons drinking for a time, only to relapse so badly that his ex-wife reclaiming him looks, sadly, like an act of pity more than anything genuinely romantic.
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/ All in all, I loved this book. I hope to read more of Michael Chabon's repertoire, since his writing is rich with history, both true and fictitious, and the way he paints pictures with his metaphors is addicting.
// I'm sorry for the massive wall of text, I can't figure out how to space paragraphs out.