Schurken der Landstraße

Eine Abenteuergeschichte

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Michael Chabon: Schurken der Landstraße (Paperback, 2018, Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH)

Paperback

Published Aug. 16, 2018 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH.

ISBN:
978-3-462-05237-4
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4 stars (1 review)

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past, Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures--from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories--in a wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade's most tantalizing tales.They're an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa A.D. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can--as blades …

14 editions

A classic adventure tale

4 stars

I hadn't read any Michael Chabon novels before and chose this one purely for its historical setting as I hoped it would fit nicely alongside a couple of other recent reads: Ibn Fadlan's travel memoirs of Western Asia in the Viking era and Edouardo Albert's humorous Conrad Monk And The Great Heathen Army adventure tale. Gentlemen Of The Road is closer to Conrad Monk in style, although not as funny, however it does feel based in a solid historical reality and I could appreciate that Chabon had certainly done his research.

The story is a classic adventure tale which gallops across medieval Khazaria at such a pace that I did sometimes find myself left behind. At its heart is a wonderful friendship between two men, apparently as different in physical appearance and temperament as it is possible to be, yet perfectly suited to each other and utterly loyal. They get …