The dozen of us who gathered last week to discuss the first four parts of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), enjoyed a robust conversation about this epic book. During the discussion, I noted Chabon's coinage of the word "aetataurate" in Chapter 7 of Part IV (p. 340). Here is the sentence:
"During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataurate delusion."
Even if you never took Latin, you could probably come up with a good guess of what the word means from the reference to nostalgia. But what I love about Chabon's nonce-word is that is he could have just said "golden age." Instead, he displayed the same love of language and wordplay that Sammy, Joe, Rosa and other characters in the novel do.
We'll discuss the last two sections of the novel on Nov. 4. Join us!
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