The Final Solution
A Story of Detection
By Michael Chabon
(Harper, Hardcover, 9780060763404, 144pp.)
Publication Date: November 2004
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Paperback
Categories: Mystery & Detective - Historical
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In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of comic books -- intertwining history, legend, and storytelling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to craft a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.
In deep retirement in the English country-side, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out -- a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case -- the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot -- beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?
Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage, which won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for fiction, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves In Their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps & Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, and the middle-grade book Summerland.
He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
“Packed with gorgeous writing…a knockout. You’ll be done before you know it. Then you might well read it again.”
-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Delightful…and deceptively profound...Chabon shows his greatness.”
-Louisville Courier Journal
“A haunting novella.”
-Publishers Weekly
“Simple and startlingly sad…Chabon has created a minor masterpiece.”
-Hartford Courant
“The writing is everything that Chabon’s fans expect--gorgeous, muscular, mildly melancholic…wonderfully executed.”
-Baltimore Sun
“Michael Chabon, is, simply, the coolest writer in America.”
-Christian Science Monitor
“Exuberant…the real mystery is how Chabon managed to fit so much hope and humanity into such a brief tale.”
-BookPage
“Chabon’s writing here is elegant and limber…[The Final Solution] is a little mystery story with big ideas.”
-San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of 2004)
“A knockout…you’ll be done before you know it. Then you might well read it again.”
-Denver Post
“Watching Chabon skillfully zigzag between literary and genre is half the fun of the book…refreshing.”
-Miami Herald
“Infused with a graceful, elegiac atmosphere…wrought with innovative construction, glittering with epiphany…remarkable.”
-Buffalo News
“One of the best-written American novels published this fall . . . an experiment by a master.”
-The New York Sun
“Brilliant and unswervingly entertaining.”
-The Forward
“A profound pleasure.”
-New York magazine
This book is on these lists:
Electrozebra's Wish List by electrozebraRead by KM
Books Read 2010 by thomas12
Dfactor39's Wish List by dfactor39
Scot's Wish List by scot
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