430 pages
English language
Published April 14, 2016 by Harper.
A man bears witness to his grandfather's deathbed confessions, which reveal his family's long-buried history and his involvement in a mail-order novelty company, World War II, and the space program.
I read it not knowing it was fiction, and I don't care now. It is a well-told combination of stories with humor and heart. Chabon is a master storyteller.
Masterful, subtle and deep and very enjoyable.
Pretty slow going, but there is some drama. Most of all it is very memorable characters, life, and wonderful tuns of phrase.
I loved this book.
Moonglow is another beautifully written novel by Michael Chabon. And yes, it is a novel, not a memoir. The author affects the memoir style quite well, and if I hadn't heard anything about his latest tome before sitting down with it, I'm sure it would have taken me in.
The characters are vivid. I really liked and sympathized with the grandfather, who was central to this story. There was much sadness, but then there was humor to buoy up this experience, along with some intrigue. When looking into the past, there are always some things that are unknowable, a bit of mystery to ponder.
This is a well-sculptured, dense novel I would recommend to anyone.
Chabon's novel is a fictional memoir of the narrator's maternal grandfather. The grandfather was a mechanically gifted but easily angered young man with a consuming interest in rocketry and space travel. He ends up in a form of secret military special forces looking for V2 assets for the US in Germany after WWII. He meets his future wife after the war. She is a war-damaged apparent holocaust survivor with a daughter by a previous marriage. The vicissitudes of this family related in a partially time shifted account is the structure of the novel. Chabon is a pleasure to read, and his Jewish mixture of comedy and tragedy is compelling. In an interview at the end of the text, Chabon admits that the memoir's grandfather has many of his own characteristics. He comments that, "My stories are all .... tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and …
Chabon's novel is a fictional memoir of the narrator's maternal grandfather. The grandfather was a mechanically gifted but easily angered young man with a consuming interest in rocketry and space travel. He ends up in a form of secret military special forces looking for V2 assets for the US in Germany after WWII. He meets his future wife after the war. She is a war-damaged apparent holocaust survivor with a daughter by a previous marriage. The vicissitudes of this family related in a partially time shifted account is the structure of the novel. Chabon is a pleasure to read, and his Jewish mixture of comedy and tragedy is compelling. In an interview at the end of the text, Chabon admits that the memoir's grandfather has many of his own characteristics. He comments that, "My stories are all .... tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat." and "by being almost completely fiction, the book manages to get at essential truths about himself that memoir would not have been able to access."
This is a twisty, turny book. It's autobiographical, but he says he's taken liberties with the facts "with due abandon". It's the story of his grandparents, and to some extent, of his mother. He spent time with his grandmother, when he was a small boy. He spent time with his grandfather, years later, when his grandfather was dying and had become loquacious.
His own observations, as a child, and as a man, are woven through with narrative written like novel, often from his grandfather's perspective. He fills in a level of detail that is clearly fiction, not details told to him by his grandfather. The three weave together, not in chronological order, but I found them easy to follow.
I loved it.
I'd describe myself as a fan of Chabon. However, I abandoned and returned this book after two chapters because I didn't like that it was a memoir/biography masquerading as a novel. Pick one - don't try to be cute and have it both ways. Perhaps it's well written, but I was in the mood for a novel, so I had no patience for this.
