a way with words: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

This is the best book that I've read in years (probably since Sebald's Vertigo). A short and simple story of one old detective's search for a missing parrot, the pet of a child orphaned during the Holocaust, The Final Solution is much more of a novella than a novel but, man, the prose is absolutely stunning. Based upon The Final Solution, I put Michael Chabon right up there with Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Arundhati Roy when it comes to elegance in the use of the English language. Here, an excerpt:

...The old man stood, shrugging. With the consciousness of failure, a gray shadow seemed to steal over his senses as if, steady as a cloud, a great obstructing satellite were scudding across the face of the sun. Meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse. The vast body of experience and lore, of corollaries and observed results, of which he felt himself master, was at a stroke rendered useless. The world around him was a page of alien text. A row of white cubes from which there escaped a mysterious drone of lamentation. A boy in a glowing miasma of threads, his staring face flat and edged with shadow as if cut from paper and pasted against the sky. A breeze drawing rippling portraits of emptiness in the pale green tips of the grass.

My brother is always talking about Chabon's book, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. I am certainly going to give it a try after this one.