Moonglow

By: Michael Chabon

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

The keeping of secrets and the telling of lies; sex and desire and ordinary love; existential doubt and model rocketry all feature in the new novel from the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

'The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother's deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.'

Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, DC? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war?

From the Jewish slums of prewar Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of the American Century, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.

©2017 Michael Chabon (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

Praise for Michael Chabon:
"Chabon is a spectacular writer, a language magician." ( Guardian)
"It's as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words." ( LA Times Book Review)
"The natural exuberance of Chabon's writing is matched by dazzling wit." ( Sunday Telegraph)
"A 'star' not in the current sense of cheap celebrity, but in the old sense of brightly shining hope. He is a writer not only of rare skill and wit but of self-evident and immensely appealing generosity." ( Washington Post)

Very well written...just can’t get over the ‘disclaimer’

This is a good book, no doubt about it. The narrator is good too. This being said there were two things that stopped me from enjoying it, unlike Chabon’s other books. The first is the ‘disclaimer’; Chabon writes something along the lines of ‘this story is true except where the truth was less interesting’. This book blurs the line between fact and fantasy, and so it’s difficult to really take it seriously. The stories of his grandfather, grandmother, uncle etc are really profound and significant but I can’t help thinking I was being manipulated as they could have been wild fabrications! The second issue is that the author and the narrator allow the no nonsense, matter of fact attitude of the protagonist, being the grandfather, to affect the character and dialogue of every individual in the book. In fact, every character appears as manifestation of the grandfather, himself and no one has their own identity. I don’t imagine this was intentional but if it were, and we were dealing with the memory of a dying man and not hearing the story through him it might make sense, but this story is told by Chabon who is not a tough taking, no nonsense sort by any means. The book has no nuance, it’s a masculine and measured, never deviating from a method of story telling that becomes pretty taxing nearing the middle of the book.