The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

[Don Higgins]

Here's a discussion online:
 
 
"Um, wait a minute. Chabon goes to a lot of trouble to establish the precise water temperature. He has Josef find a thermometer and bring it with him to the bank of the river, because he wants to establish unequivocally that the water is really, really cold. But 22.2 degrees Celsius isn't cold. It's actually 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and swimming in 72-degree water doesn't seem like much of a hardship. The temperature is not a typo, by the way: it was published in a New Yorker excerpt and in multiple printings of both the hardback and the paperback edition of the novel. Instead, it's simply an error. (It's one that obviously has since been called to Chabon's attention, because in the book's 2012 edition it has been changed to 2.2 degrees Celsius.*)"
 
Sorry I'm late to the party. I remember that error but it did not detract from my falling in love with that novel. 

 


________________________________
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2013 4:31 PM
Subject: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Finally started reading this, and I'm enjoying it so far, but I was really thrown on p. 51 by the temperature of the freezing river water: 22.2 Celsius. It was hard to see how this could be a typo. I thought at first that maybe it was some sort of cute bit of magical realism, along some sort of "and why the sea is boiling hot" riff. But then a couple of pages later, he actually spells it out: Twenty-two degrees Celsius. Then later, 8 Celsius is considered too cold to be out with gloves and a hat.
I'm reading the Picador 2001 edition, so he ought to have had time to catch the error. I'm just really surprised that any writer could make such an obvious error, and that it wasn't immediately caught and corrected by his editors. Or maybe there's some weird po-mo payoff later in the book? Mr. Kohut, any theories? 

Laura
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130319/f51c463b/attachment.html>