You won’t understand the movie, if you didn’t read the book.
Often said, but seldom true, at least if the director’s any good. In our c
ase, it’s the murder victim’s chess board that presages the themes of this novel: intimate, sexual, national, and cosmic. But the chess player merely gets an early tantalizing whiff of what’s to come in this brilliant work of art.
Chabon hurls a macho-Ranger gauntlet, successfully challenging Chandler at mystery noir. No divorced and drunken shamus gets sapped over the head more frequently than ex-Detective Meyer Landsman; they’re always ex-detectives, who limp & hobble up more blind-alleys than a smack-addicted white rat.
So, I’m feebly attempting to match metaphors with Chabon. It’s not possible !.!.! He drops them like naked rice balls in protesting goose grease. There’s more in a single, at random page that I could think up in my whole three minutes. They are spiced up with delicious, mixed-culture adjectives and a hearty slurry of racial argot.
All this clap-trap was familiar ground for a goyim like me; a decade-serving husband/slave to a Jewish American Princess (New York, commie, Navy WWII WAVE); followed by a baseball season in Jerusalem, playing
for the Israeli Air Force MOD blue & white; and 
sympathetic to finding a haven for Anatol Lein and Leonid Shamkovitch, both top ten world chess players from the USSR, but preferring the U.S.A. as a climate, specifically the 1976 football season, at Fiddler’s Green Chess Club & Book Salon in San Francisco.
So, the committed readers within our noon-ish midst, realize that after every clonk on the head, our cartoon Meyer, unlike the current NFL squads, suffers no concussive long-term effect; in fact,
he may go on to have several healthy babies. We realize that good, will persevere over evil. The bad guys will disappear off the pages; a fate worse than death. And rising from the Mexican ashes, will be the glimmer of hope that yet another Meyer Landsman adventure will be penned for our entertainment; and maybe next time, Bina will get a mention on the back cover. This is the first good book in six years at the Guerneville Regional Library.
White mates in two moves
Often said, but seldom true, at least if the director’s any good. In our c
ase, it’s the murder victim’s chess board that presages the themes of this novel: intimate, sexual, national, and cosmic. But the chess player merely gets an early tantalizing whiff of what’s to come in this brilliant work of art.Chabon hurls a macho-Ranger gauntlet, successfully challenging Chandler at mystery noir. No divorced and drunken shamus gets sapped over the head more frequently than ex-Detective Meyer Landsman; they’re always ex-detectives, who limp & hobble up more blind-alleys than a smack-addicted white rat.
So, I’m feebly attempting to match metaphors with Chabon. It’s not possible !.!.! He drops them like naked rice balls in protesting goose grease. There’s more in a single, at random page that I could think up in my whole three minutes. They are spiced up with delicious, mixed-culture adjectives and a hearty slurry of racial argot.
All this clap-trap was familiar ground for a goyim like me; a decade-serving husband/slave to a Jewish American Princess (New York, commie, Navy WWII WAVE); followed by a baseball season in Jerusalem, playing
for the Israeli Air Force MOD blue & white; and 
sympathetic to finding a haven for Anatol Lein and Leonid Shamkovitch, both top ten world chess players from the USSR, but preferring the U.S.A. as a climate, specifically the 1976 football season, at Fiddler’s Green Chess Club & Book Salon in San Francisco.So, the committed readers within our noon-ish midst, realize that after every clonk on the head, our cartoon Meyer, unlike the current NFL squads, suffers no concussive long-term effect; in fact,
he may go on to have several healthy babies. We realize that good, will persevere over evil. The bad guys will disappear off the pages; a fate worse than death. And rising from the Mexican ashes, will be the glimmer of hope that yet another Meyer Landsman adventure will be penned for our entertainment; and maybe next time, Bina will get a mention on the back cover. This is the first good book in six years at the Guerneville Regional Library.White mates in two moves
