Akiva Reads

by Michael Chabon

Rereading, 6/22/2013. (Has it been 6 years? Wow.) There's a moment where Landsman tries to speak American without an accent, and it made me think of my grandfather's new york jewish cadence, and in that moment I remembered that he's gone and so is much of his world.

I think I like it even more on reread, though I'm not sure it'll upset Kavalier and Clay as my favorite Chabon book. My yiddish vocabulary has grown, if only a little---I really appreciated all the plays and metaphors on "faygele," dancing lightly around the word itself but never saying it. I desperately want the dead man and Landsman's sister to survive; I have to remind myself again and again that their fates were known from the first pages, and I grieve them all over again.

I don't know how insightful and organized this review is going to be....

Finally finished this one off-- and I want to read it again! Sometimes the writing was a little pretentious (like the lists of objects, which you can tell Chabon likes to do), but it was always a great read. I loved the Yiddish words and invented slang; Sitka came alive for me, in its tired, ramshackle, and thoroughly Jewish way. Often, I was reading more for Sitka than the plot or any of the other characters.

The plot towards the end began to remind me of Neal Stephenson in its conspiracy-filled unlikeliness, but it was still interesting.