Moonglow audiobook

"'Moonglow' has been looked up 2315 times, is no one's favorite word yet, has been added to 3 lists, has 1 comment, and is not a valid SCRABBLE word". Michael Chabon: I love your classy name - your books -and your wonderful talented -courageous wife: author Ayelet Waldman. So before I begin my review I have a few things to say local boy!I own every physical book - written - by 'both' Michael and Ayelet. --BAY AREA AUTHORS -- spotlight voices within the Jewish Community--- both bright - adorable - an inspiring married couple! I have a deep love for Ayelet. I feel a primal connection---( woman to woman - wife to wife - mother to mother - Jew to Jew). When Netgalley and Edelweiss- both- turned my request down for Moonglow and Ayelet's new 'soon-to-be-released' book, called, "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life"....I kinda laughed. OF COURSE. ( Jewish Karma) I must own their PHYSICAL books. When I told Ayelet that I was turned down for an arc of her new book when I saw her a few weeks ago - she offered to step in and get a book to me .... I said ...."don't, I can handle it". "I'll get a copy myself". Thanks anyway, Ayelet. Can't wait to read her book, too. "Moonglow" -- fictional nonfiction"--is a lovely physical book. I especially like the inside black & white moon artwork when you first open the book. It was easy to imagine Michael listening to his grandfathers final confessions--10 straight days before he died.....being privy to the lies, conflicts, and secrets, that his grandfather had kept secret.Underneath the humor, it was inevitably painful for his grandfather and grandmother to deal with pain, loss, grief upsets, death, suffering of any kind. They would avoid - or minimize -talking about anything that was negative. Instead they would lie to each other - hold onto secrets thinking it was their best option. Michael was able to see in those last ten days of his grandfathers life -- just how crushing his grandparents marriage really was at times due to all secrets & lies they both kept hidden. I appreciate Michael writing this book for a couple of reasons: ......The more I read - it becomes clear how family bonds get stuck and pass down - generation to generation - behaviors that undercut & destroy relationships. Michael set out to change those patterns. The secrets are out of the bag....Terrific stories! Terrific storytelling. At the end of Michael's grandfathers life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. Michael begins his story by telling us what his grandfather was like as a child in South Philadelphia- a wild kid - who once threw a kitten out of a window. The storytelling jumps around - which slowed down my reading to be honest. I didn't mind - but several times I turned back pages to check dates....Was I in the 60's or 80's? The first 80-100 pages I read extra slow...It took me a little longer ( slow turd), to understand the importance "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel", by Willy Ley - a favorite book of grandfather- was to him ... and just how big of a turning point that book might have been. Michael's grandfather, who normally drove to every shuttle firing--- had a silent boycott during the Apollo era --shocking his parents on July 20, 1969 after months of displaying fascination and excitement about the imminent manned landing on the moon, he had abruptly declined to join his family when the entire population of earth was watching Neil Armstrong fulfill the lifelong dream that Von Braun and his grandfather both shared. All he said was...."the way they have done it is totally wrong". Years later - he never wanted to miss a launch again!!!! I found Michael's grandfather fascinating!!! At times I was cracking up. His clothes - for example. Gramps ( I'm just going to call Michael's grandfather- Gramps from here on out).....was living in Florida after his wife died. His daily "uniform"....( so to speak), consisted of khaki shorts, one of seven he purchased at Kmart, to go with his one of seven polo shirts. On his feet he wore leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture with white tube socks. Paul, my husband, told me --- don't ever let me wear tube socks with sandals when I become an old man! ( cute....as this visual IS Paul's visual of BEING OLD). Other parts were sad: January 28, 1986- was the 11th yahrzeit of his wife's death -Michael's grandmother- and Gramps was at the grave in Pennsylvania. At the same time - same day - Tuesday - an O-ring failed at Cape Canaveral. The shuttle began to break apart. His grandfather did not know until he got back to his motor lodge.Michael called his grandfather that day- as soon as he heard the news....Gramps was saying "Too goddamn cold". "36° at launch. Idiot bureaucrats". Michael and his grandfather talked about the cemetery ... Michael says, "I know you miss her. I wish you were still here". Gramps says, "I'm glad she isn't. If she saw the mess her grave is, she be furious and she'd blame me. Because I insisted on that cemetery". We learn as much about Michael's grandmother as we do his grandfather...Her fortune telling cards, The painful life she had growing up during the war, her mental illness, ( the private suffering), and a lot about their marriage together. I loved it .... and I couldn't help think about my own grandpa and grandma Cookie... Who lived in Oakland and were in a Jewish home late in life.I fully enjoyed the richness of family history - honesty- Jewish roots - and Michael's devotion to family. This book is a HUGE GIFT for the Jewish Community! Jewish Book clubs all over the states will be having discussions -I'll be reading this book again in the spring of 2017 with a group in the Bay Area This book was picked as THE BOOK of the YEAR for "Jewish Learning"....A project of the Jewish Community Library. Michael will be speaking all over the Bay Area in many months to come! Congratulations, Michael.

4.5 stars Michael Chabon has held a place in my literary heart ever since I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and has insured that place with his latest book. Chabon's inspiration for the book were the stories his grandfather told while he was on pain killers and close to death. In his opening author's note, though he warns us that what we will soon be reading may not exactly be true. " In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts, except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whatever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and the interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon."For me, whether the stories and memories are totally true or partially imagined just didn't matter. I'll take them as they are , whatever they are because I felt they were told by Chabon with love and it felt like he had perhaps captured the essence of this history - his family's. His grandfather almost kills his boss, almost blows up a bridge, and is obsessed with rockets. The stories are funny and sad, and feel real , moving around times from the present, to before he met Chabon's grandmother, to his time in the war, arriving at Nordhausen concentration camp after the liberation, to their life together, to his time in prison, to the retirement community where his grandfather lived at the end of his life. While the changes in time and place aren't always seamless, the telling was very much like our memories, a little complex and not always in chronological order . I also loved when he tells of his grandmother and the stories she told him . Her story was a sad one as we learn of her past , her demons , and mental breakdowns. There were times when I asked myself where this narrative was going and the answer is straight to the heart . I felt at times, it was a little drawn out, thus not quite 5 stars but I definitely recommend it, especially if to Chabon fans. Thanks to HarperCollins and Edelweiss for the opportunity to read this advance copy .

"I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives."- Michael Chabon, MoonglowFantastic. I needed to chew on this for a night, to stare at the moon, dream, and fantasize about what I really wanted to say -- and write my panegyric in a delicate space after the book. First, I sometimes wonder if there is a genre Chabon can't master with his metaphors, his exuberance and his fantasy? At this point, he could write a book centered on zoophilic and beastial erotica and I'd gladly plunk down the full-price cost AND read it. Anyway, last night as the stars blossomed and the moon swung up over the Superstition Mountains, I felt a tug of ideas, but I needed to let them seep, to swirl, to swim and sink into the dark side of my brain. Perhaps, I'm ready. Who knows?I'm not sure if Chabon has even read Karl Ove Knausgård, but Chabon is doing something similar. He is playing with the structure of memoir, but it isn't memoir even exactly. It isn't a biography of his mother, grandmother, grandfather EXACTLY. It is family fan fiction. It is fictionalized memoir, an autobiographical novel.Chabon, gives it up in his Author's Note:"In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts except when the facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whenever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon."There is a scene in the book where Chabon is describing his mother, playing with horses carved by her father. Through the act of narrowing her eyes, squinting, she was able to transform these carved toys into real horses as she played. THAT is what Chabon is doing. He is narrowing his eyes on his family's history. He is letting his imagination take the information he has and bend it, fill in the gaps, expand into an almost magical fancy. It really is a thing of wonder. The real amazing thing too about this book is it gives the reader the license and permission to do the same thing to his/her own history. We as humans are natural mythmakers. Is Chabon doing anything different than his Jewish forefathers did with the Old Testament's great myths? The telling, and retelling of these "family" stories start to get bent into family folklore. Pieces are added and subtracted until a new story a new myth is constructed. It might not be straight and accurate according to carbon dating, sequences, or people. The ledgers might not quite ever balance, but at its heart ... these family stories/myths contain our BIG truths. They contain us and our humanity, both our ugly, painful, and grounded past, and our lofty dreams of moons, lovers and rockets.

Just as you sense some authors haven’t yet written their best book – Zadie Smith? - you feel others have already written their masterpiece and no matter how many more they write they will never quite top it. Nicole Krauss with The History of Love springs to mind. As does Chabon with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I’d be amazed if he ever tops that. Moonglow doesn’t but nevertheless it is a thrilling and highly distinguished achievement. First of all, think of your own favourite grandfather and try to put together a narrative of his life. I’m sure you’ll soon realise some defining “facts” have never quite been verified, that there are conflicting reports of certain events, one or other of which you choose to believe to suit your own narrative, that there’s a fair bit of hearsay colouring his story and there are blanks you yourself have endeavoured to fill in. It was fitting I read this together with Orlando, a high spirited pastiche of the pretensions of all biography. Moonglow is purportedly a memoir of Chabon’s grandfather but it reads like a highly sophisticated novel. Often while reading I found myself thinking, no one surely could have a grandfather this interesting, so tailor made to be the hero of a novel. The same was true of his grandmother who, it will turn out, has created a fictitious self to survive the fallout of her wartime experiences. That misted twilight realm between fact and fiction is where this book mostly operates. It makes you think a lot about memory, its expedient ordering principles, its white lies and its hindsight stocktaking and balancing of the books. The other hugely impressive facet of this book is its structure. Chabon’s grandfather is dying of cancer when he narrates haphazardly to his grandson his memories. Chabon resists any temptation to write a chronological account of his grandfather’s life. Instead it’s as if he mirrors the non-linear laws of memory’s treasure hunting determination to find meaning and order. Like I said the material he has to work with is the stuff of any novelist’s dreams. His grandfather’s role in the Second World War is to find the Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, before the Russians do. When he learns of the thousands of slave workers deployed to build the rockets his intention is to kill Braun. He marries an Auschwitz survivor. She is as compelling a character as the grandfather and their marriage is depicted with moving though unsentimental tenderness. When she has a breakdown his anger is such that he tries to kill his boss, for no reason except to vent his rage, and is sent to prison. He has a lifelong obsession with rockets and space travel, a talent in this field too. “The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.” Annoyingly I watched a documentary about the hunt for the Nazi rocket scientists a month before starting this. I can’t now remember if Michael Chabon’s grandfather was mentioned. No doubt in my memory of the programme he will eventually play a starring role. Often fiction can come so much closer to defining truth than facts.

Given the opportunity, and if I could work out the mechanics of it, I would do some things to Michael Chabon’s prose, things that would make Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson blush. Because that stuff is purty. The hallmark of true greatness (and let’s call the requirements for greatness a combination of natural talent and aptitude, sweat equity, and single-minded devotion to craft) is making something exceedingly difficult look effortless (a little bit like how I make it look so easy to poke yourself in the eye while trying to drink through a straw), and no matter how lyrical or grammatically obscure Chabon’s prose, it skates easily across the surface of the page, the most well-honed pair of skates on a perfectly Zambonied ice rink.Contrast his prose with, say, Jonathan Franzen or the late and rightfully oft-lamented David Foster Wallace, both comparable titans of the modern American literary fiction scene—when I read one of their most finely crafted sentences, I find myself thinking, “now THAT is a writer.” Of course, if I’m thinking that, then what I’m NOT thinking about any longer is the story—and that can be distracting, even if it’s worth it to appreciate their linguistic gymnastics.Chabon at his best, on the other hand, somehow manages the neat trick of writing with a skill and elegance that is nearly peerless, but feels so natural that you are immersed in the world he creates from start to finish. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his own episodic occurrences of writeritis, mind you (witness the bulk of Gentlemen of the Road, for example), but they are fewer and farther between, it seems.I should note that Chabon’s plotting and storytelling are not always equal to his prose; after feeling somewhat let down by Telegraph Avenue and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, I went into Moonglow with some trepidation, a feeling that persisted through the first quarter of the book as I struggled to get into the flow. Once I did, however, and I found it happened right around the time Chabon begins describing his grandfather’s experiences in World War II, I got sucked back into that familiar and blissful state of simultaneously admiring Chabon’s dazzling skill while not really noticing it. Moonglow purports to be a somewhat ficitionalized biography of Chabon’s maternal (but not genetic) grandfather, but as one might expect, the veracity of the tale is questionable at best (and revealed to be even more tenuous in the book’s Acknowledgments). If it doesn’t throb with the restless, youthful energy and heartache of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh or match the epic grandeur and scope of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, it still manages to carve out a rightful place alongside some of Chabon’s better work, a quieter but still imaginative meditation on truth, story, perception, grief, anger, dreams, and, above all, the messy byproduct of the union of those things we call life.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon is a 2016 Harper publication. I must admit, up front, that I’ve never read a book by this author. That is not to say I don’t have his books sitting on my shelves, or loaded onto my Kindle, because I do. However, I’ve never managed to get around to reading them. My library was really pushing this book recently, so I placed a hold on it. Shockingly, few people were ahead of me, so I nabbed a copy almost immediately. Having no idea what to expect, but hoping for something different and maybe a little challenging, I dived into what some have referred to as a ‘novel memoir’ or memoir/novel. Michael Chabon, in 1989, travels to Oakland, California to visit his dying grandfather. Never having revealed a great deal to his grandson during his life, his grandfather decides to remedy that, by regaling Michael with stories from his colorful and adventurous life, while on his deathbed.‘Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard in its final ten days.’The author never refers to his grandfather by name, and I have no idea why, but the gentleman lived through many significant phases in history. His tale is not told chronologically, but skips through time in no particular order. While I’m usually pretty good at dealing with flashbacks in novels, this nilly willy time trip, did create some problems for me at times. I also lost interest a time or two, as the topics just didn’t appeal to me, in any way. But, there were poignant moments that made up for those dry spells. I may have this all wrong, but I gathered the grandfather was the main focus of the book, and the other characters were meant to be secondary. I didn’t know what to make of his grandfather for a while, but by the end of the book, I realized I had enjoyed getting to know the man and appreciated his humor. Now, why is the book labeled as a novel memoir?“In preparing for this memoir, I have stuck to the facts except when the facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” How much is absolute truth, how much is embellishment? Is it a real memoir, or a novel disguised as a memoir?Either way, the book is unique, with realistic and compelling characterizations, and a sophisticated prose, which is what I liked best about it. Overall, this one is a little off the beaten path for me. It’s not the type of book I would want to read often, but I am glad I gave it a try, and it has inspired me to move the books I already own by this author closer to the top of my TBR pile. 3.5 stars

"I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back and you see all you did with all that time is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they're all still around. I'm ashamed of myself.""I'm not ashamed of you," I said. "I'm proud of you."..."Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit." Moonglow is a pretty good story by Michael Chabon, a novel cum fictionalized memoir centered on Chabon's maternal grandfather but in many ways a multigenerational family portrait. I've read two of Chabon's books prior to Moonglow: his children's baseball fantasy book Summerland that I found endearing and with great storytelling and imagination (but lost me on some of the baseball bits) and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, one of my all time favorite books that I try to re-read every year or so. So I was expecting to enjoy Moonglow, but I was not expecting to be as enchanted as I was with this read, and formally usher Chabon into my list of favorite writers.There are so many things I loved about Moonglow. One is how tightly wound and cohesive Chabon's narrative ultimately proves to be, when from the outset it looks like a series of anecdotes and episodes in the life of his grandfather, grandmother, mother, or other family member. But Chabon's masterful storytelling means that all of the stories have a purpose in the larger whole, and something once introduced usually reappears in a new or interesting way, and whether or not it's impactful on the whole, there are no hanging details left unresolved. Early in the narrative, in the final years of Chabon's grandfather's life, we're introduced to his quest to kill the alligator or snake that ate Ramon, a cat belonging to the deceased husband of Sally. It's a perfect meet-cute and meet-quirk of a scene, in which Sally and the grandfather interact, form opinions and revise them and revise again, and eventually leads to the grandfather beginning a relationship with Sally and embarking on the mission to find and kill the alligator/snake. Nearing the end of the book, that dangling detail comes back full circle: when Sally and the grandfather are out looking for the dastardly reptile, in the midst of a declaration of love, Ramon himself appears, bloody and blackened and fat from eating what was imagined to be his killer. If a small moment like this is properly and charmingly revisited and concluded, if differently from how the reader may have thought things would turn out, Chabon has it mastered with the larger set pieces and major themes: his grandmother's mysterious past and demons that torment her; his grandfather's love of rockets through the years; his grandfather's strong but occasionally tenyous relationship with Chabon's mother who is not his biological child.Chabon's grandfather gets the lion's share of the attention, and he is a marvelous character and sounds as though he was also a pretty amazing man. It opens with a fantastic little moment of Chabon's grandfather basically going postal on the president of a company that just fired him: he was chosen since they felt he'd be unlikely to make any trouble, and Chabon uses this to show the reader just how wrong that idea is, and just how many levels, how many lives his grandfather has. From the streets of Philadelphia to WWII secret missions, to prison radios and rocket building to NASA model making, Chabon's grandfather wears many hats but is always devoted to his wife, increasingly troubled and unstable, and his daughter, Chabon's mother. The relationship between Chabon and his grandfather is also so well drawn, as they interrupt the storytelling to bring nonsequitors and related questions up, and we see the love between them and the family similarities, but also evidence of the generational gap and distance too of growing up in very different eras and with different guiding sensibilities. There's something somewhat Princess Bride-y in it, which adds to its charm: Chabon and his grandfather switch off narrating events (and his grandmother and mother do as well, as does Sally later on), and then there's the commentary within the story on the events or the telling of those events. Chabon's writing is, to my taste, great: revealing, smart, light. He wields metaphor and culture and history deftly, and though he can write overlong in some passages that can slow down one's interest (sometimes on the details of the rockets I found myself wanting to hurry through), most of the time you're effortlessly carried through on the strength of the narrative, the characters, and the humor. Oh the humor in Moonglow! God I found this funny, laughing out loud in parts, appreciate chuckles in others, devouring scenes with big wide smiles. Taste is subjective of course, and not everyone has the same sense or appreciation for humor, but I loved reading Moonglow and a lot had to do with just how much fun it was to read. There's a part in which the grandfather and Chabon's mother go to visit the grandmother in the hospital, where a play is about to be performed, and a female caretaker introduces them to the author of the play: "How are you?" Mrs Outcault said very loudly.Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat hanger of God."Sign language," Mrs. Outcault explained. "Poor thing's deaf as a boot. I heard he was struck by lightning, though I can't say for sure."With his long pallid fingers and his nails manicured to a moonlike luster, Mr. Casamonaca continued to draw things across the space between him and my mother. The regular rippling of a corrugated roof. The outline of a jellyfish. The downward spiral of water in a toilet bowl.Mrs. Outcault nodded emphatically. "Oh yes," she said. "I know. You're so right.""What's he saying?""I have no idea," Mrs. Outcault said through a tight smile. She kept on nodding. "It isn't real sign language at all. Just something he made up. He never learned to speak English very well, and in the past few years he's lost the ability to read and write in Italian.""He - Then how did he write a play?""He dictated it to your mother, which is why she has been so involved in all this. Using those crazy signs of his.""My mom doesn't know sign language.""Apparently, she is fluent in Mr. Casamonaca's."My mother watched Mr. Casamonaca's hands and fingers explain the behavior of skyrockets, the opening of a beer can, and the proper means for setting a golf ball on a tee."It looks like he's just making it up as he goes along," she said."That is a popular theory," said Mrs. Outcault. There is so much life in Moonglow: a novel with the trappings of memoir that wraps in the lives of Chabon's grandfather, grandmother, mother, and even himself in parts. The humor, the struggles, the desperation, the guilt, the Jewish culture, the bonds of blood... all here and all executed brilliantly and woven into the fabric of the larger whole. The family is so well drawn (coming from real people, I suppose it was both easier and harder to do) and the narrative strong, the moments from life well chosen to entertain and to better flesh out into a story of a family. I really liked this book, and while parts did feel like they could have been edited a bit tighter to not slow the reader's pace/enjoyment, this family saga gets 4.5 enthusiastic stars from me, rounded up for the fantastic writing and sheer fun. "Everything you've been telling me is true, though, right?""Well, it's all the way I remember it happening," he said. "Beyond that I make no guarantees."

This is my third book from Michael Chabon. Chabon never writes the same book twice, and each book has been terrific in its own way. His endlessly celebrated—and one of my all-time favourite novels— The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay trades comic book shtick with political and societal upheaval while building some of the most memorable character moments I’ve ever read. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union , by contrast, is a gumshoe noir set in a fictional Jewish settlement in Alaska that could sit comfortably beside Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. What the two books share, aside from an author, are a dedication to character, stellar writing, a fascination with the ephemera of times past, and deeply humanistic narratives that stuck with me long after the final pages were turned. Other than that, the books are wildly different. Moonglow, again, twisted my expectations of a Chabon novel. First thing: it isn’t really a novel, but not quite a memoir. Chabon has pasted together conversations with his palliative grandfather in his final days, oodles of research, historical fact, memory (that tricky, unreliable, ephemeral creature), and liberties taken to “conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it (Author’s Note, Moonglow.” It makes for a tale that seems at times to be too strange to be non-fiction, to personal to be anything but real, and had me questioning throughout what was true. In a stroke of brilliance, the questions I was asking about the narrative are the same that Chabon’s family ends up asking through his research. This time-hopping, perspective shifting narrative both serves to keep the story moving at a lively pace while inviting the reader into the thicket of the diverging accounts with which Chabon has been wrestling. It’s a clever way of putting the reader in the headspace of the writer, but the book never seems like an experiment in structure alone. The book is filled with stories and recollections that run the full gamut of human feeling. There’s the account of Chabon’s grandfather in his golden years sojourning into the woods in pursuit of a household pet-eating snake that is equal parts comedic and poignant display of grief. This is then juxtaposed with a WWII mission where his grandfather plays an interesting part in the American pursuit of V-2 rocket technology. The story jumps from adventure, to reminiscence, to regret, the joy of discovery, the pursuit of a worthy task, and familial love.What most surprised me with the novel/memoir was how large a part Chabon’s grandmother plays in the proceedings. The synopsis on the dust jacket downplays her involvement, though her story is central to the telling made by Chabon’s grandfather on his deathbed. The revelations made by the stories told by his grandfather contrast with historical fact and, later, medical documentation. There are truths and lies woven together in the same spirit of love that they become almost impossible to separate without destroying the entire tapestry. What I’ve written so far downplays the humanistic narrative of the story. Chabon’s grandfather’s struggle to bring comfort to his mentally ill wife is heart wrenching in its stoic portrayal of love. Chabon’s grandmother serves initially as a mystery, then a tragic character, but resolves into person that seems real because of her conflicted nature. Just a little over the mid-way point of the novel, this exchange between Chabon and his grandfather about the nature of their conversations seem to drive home the purpose of the novel.”You think this explains everything,” my grandfather said. He freighted the word explains with as much contempt as it would bear before exiling it from his mouth. “Me and your grandmother. Your mother. My time in prison. The war.” He turned from the window.In his eyes, through the haze of hydromorophone, I saw a flash of something I took, based on the historical record, for anger. “You think it explains you.”“It explains a lot,” I said.“It explains nothing.”“It explains a little.” (Moonglow page 239-240) It’s true: the novel does not explain everything. It does not tie up the narrative in a neat little bow and send it on its way towards the reader. It struggles against its packaging and it refuses to conform to any box that might hold it. Chabon's books are each different, I think, because he's trying to answer a different question with each project. In his writing of Moonglow, Chabon explains a little in an effort to explain himself. Though it might not all fit together and conform to a single vision of the truth, it makes a strong approximation of truth. It is that pursuit of truth to which many of us aspire, and Moonglow is the beautiful struggle of one man to uncover that truth.

Though this is billed as a memoir it reads like a riveting novel. It's surprising how a life can be organised into a watertight constellation where everything falls so neatly into the place. Aren't lives messy and disordered and unfinished? Chabon's grandparents though are a novelist's dream. The grandfather is an amateur rocket enthusiast. During the war he is part of a special operation tasked with finding the designer of the V2 rocket before the Russians get him. This is Wernher Von Braun. In many ways he is what the grandfather dreams of being, a genius. Except when the grandfather sees the conditions under which the slave workers were compelled to toil his prevailing emotion towards Von Braun becomes murderous. I didn't know the man who later sent man to the moon on behalf of America could have been and probably should have been tried as a war criminal. But more compelling is the tortuous but loving relationship shared by Chabon's grandparents. The grandmother is a French Jew who, unlike the rest of her family, survived Hitler's psychopathic insanity. However, it appears she has told a few lies. I loved all the sections where Chabon recounts his childhood memories of his mentally unstable but compelling grandmother. It's often the detail, always exuberantly and eloquently and deftly chosen, that makes this such a fabulous read. And how beautifully he elegises the sustaining love shared by two immensely loveable eccentric outcasts. Chabon writes brilliantly and he's a handsome devil to boot!

“Moonglow” is a wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory. Chabon suggests that it was written as an act of rebellion against his upbringing. “Keeping secrets was the family business,” he says, “but it was a business that none of us ever profited from.” His courage to break that code of silence was inspired by stories his dying grandfather told him more than 25 years ago. “His fetish for self-reliance made him secretive,” Chabon says, but their final meeting produced an unusual torrent of reminiscence. “Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life,” Chabon writes, “I heard during the final ten days.” And — what do you know! — the old man turns out to have been a Jewish superhero with a brain “whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence. . . .To read the full review and watch The Totally Hip Video Book Review, go to The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

This is my first experience reading Michael Chabon. It won't be the last. This work has captivated me for the past week as I moved from story to story with "Mike" as his grandfather related the experiences of his lifetime. The whole notion of a fictionalized autobiography left me rather cold before reading Moonglow. Now I'm a convert...I believe that a truly skilled writer can inspire me, thrill me, using unexpected literary combinations....especially when they are filled with the obvious love that Chabon brings to this work.What is "real" and what is not is probably beside the point here. One point is the importance of the stories we tell in our families, how we create our lore and sense of who we are. This can rise or fall on problems of trust but can be saved by love. You may detect my avoiding certain specifics about the book, such as who is at the center, etc., well I guess I am. A young man named Mike is narrating this book based on the conversations he had with his maternal grandfather shortly before his grandfather died. Or did he. What stories have come from within the author's mind vs from within his family.There was an afterword in my edition (and hopefully in all) wherein Chabon talks more about what is at play in this book, the family stories, his grandfather, grandmother, his mother, "real" memories vs family lore vs the type of memories that children retain based partly on reality and partly on confused recollection. Then there is the mind of the author who uses his creativity to bring his family together in a story which combines everything. Understand, this is me the reader speaking here. I am not paraphrasing the author. I am trying to put some form on this book for myself. BUT it doesn't need it. It is something to be enjoyed for itself and I recommend that you do.

Every so often, there comes a book that is so heartbreakingly real and so stylistically accomplished that it makes you feel like you're never going to pick up another book again, because what would be the point? Then there are those times when a book so sparks you with a love of narrative and of your fellow people, that you want to rush out and just smother yourself in stories. Michael Chabon's latest is, somehow, both of these. Easily my favourite book of the year.