The Final Solution

Name: The Final Solution
ISBN: 9780060777104

A Story of Detection

Michael Chabon

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured the golden age of comic books, intertwining history, legend and story-telling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to create a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that re-imagines the classic 19th-century detective story.

In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year old man, vaguely recollected by the locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his bookkeeping than 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 grey 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? Or do they hold a significance at once more prosaic and far more sinister?

Though the solution to this last case may be beyond even the reach of the once famed sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed to the reader in a wrenching resolution to this brilliant homage. The Final Solution is a work from a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

“Brilliant and unswervingly entertaining.” —The Forward

“Watching Chabon skillfully zigzag between literary and genre is half the fun of the book…refreshing.” —Miami Herald

“Exuberant…the real mystery is how Chabon managed to fit so much hope and humanity into such a brief tale.” —BookPage

“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

“A profound pleasure.” —New York magazine

“A prose magician, Chabon is that rare literary anomaly: a gentle-spirited writer of boundless ambition.” —Village Voice

“This is literature in mid-transformation, the modernist bleeding into the postmodern and beyond.” —Time magazine

“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

“Michael Chabon, is, simply, the coolest writer in America.” —Christian Science Monitor

“The tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Chabon…this is literature in mid-transformation, the modernist bleeding into the postmodern and beyond.” —Time magazine

“Chabon writes with plummy luxury . . . the language is luscious enough to lap up.” —Washington Post

“The writing is everything that Chabon’s fans expect—gorgeous, muscular, mildly melancholic…wonderfully executed.” —Baltimore Sun

“Deftly composed…the slender but elegant narrative begins churning on its way…seating us around a rooming-house dinner table of a Sunday with a full cast of secondary characters…it’s a method that dovetails beautifully…[The Final Solution] is a lovingly constructed tribute to a form.” —Chicago Tribune

“Packed with gorgeous writing…a knockout. You’ll be done before you know it. Then you might well read it again.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“On par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon’s last novel, the marvelous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay…exceptional.” —New York Times Book Review

“At once an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism, and a mash note to the beloved boys’ tales of Chabon’s youth, The Final Solution is a major minor work that will come to be seen as a hinge piece in the development of Chabon’s art…A prose magician, Chabon is that rare literary anomaly: a gentle-spirited writer of boundless ambition." —Village Voice

“Chabon’s fans will eagerly clue in on a fine new quality in his nimble voice-something firm, rich, and anything but child’s play.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Simple and startlingly sad…Chabon has created a minor masterpiece.” —Hartford Courant

“Delightful…and deceptively profound...Chabon shows his greatness.” —Louisville Courier Journal

“A haunting novella.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Michael Chabon (born 1963, Washington, D.C.) is one of the most celebrated American novelists of his generation, and Jewish history, identity, and imagination run through much of his best-known work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) follows two Jewish cousins, one a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, who create comic-book heroes in 1940s New York; it joins the immigrant experience, the Holocaust’s shadow, and the Golem legend with the birth of American popular culture. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate-history Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, imagines a Yiddish-speaking homeland that never lasted, and it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise Awards. Other works return to Jewish themes, among them the essay collection Maps and Legends, the novella The Final Solution, the novel Telegraph Avenue, which explores Black-Jewish relations and shared cultural ground in Oakland, and the family memoir Moonglow. Throughout, Chabon writes about exile, inheritance, memory, and the question of what it means to belong.

Chabon has also been an active public voice on Jewish literary culture, and he has argued for a renewed, playful engagement with Yiddish language and tradition and for the creative possibilities of Jewish storytelling. His other honors include the Michael L. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature (for Summerland’s companion recognition in the field, as well as a National Jewish Book Award), and he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman.