Moonglow Low Price CD: A Novel (CD-Audio)
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Staff Reviews
Michael Chabon has the ability, if we choose to read his books, to remind us if who we are and where we
came from. You may not think you need reminding. You may be right. It is possible, I suppose, that you
live in perfect empathy with your fellow human beings and never lose sight of the beauty that makes life's
pain worthwhile. If so, I envy you. I need reminders. I do not always remember to view my life as a story
and not a random series of events. Sometimes, I do not even remember that there is a choice. Reading
Michael Chabon reminds me. It is something I have come to rely upon and have yet to be let down.
“Moonglow” is a rare, excellent book. Mr. Chabon, his publisher, and all those involved in its creation
should be very proud. I have read fictional biographies and autobiographies that contain fiction, but
nothing quite exactly like what Chabon has done with this novel. He has subverted the playground of
drunken narcissists like Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac, the fictionalized autobiography, and turned
it into a confessional where the generational divide between grandfathers and grandsons is as vast as
where only rockets can take us and as close as a room where someone is waiting to die. If you have half a
heart, you will laugh and get choked up while reading “Moonglow.” If you have half an eye, you will be
dazzled by how seamlessly Chabon interweaves the large and small events of his narrative until his reader
forgets which is which or why the distinction mattered in the first place. You will be reminded.
Praising Michael Chabon is better than being a sun worshiper. There are no nights of doubt or eclipses to
worry about. The writing shines and shines. If you want my prediction, after making the wise decision to
read “Moonglow,” you will be left feeling grateful that there are writers of Michael Chabon's caliber
among us. What's true or isn't in this book, I think you'll find, is purely trivial. It is all true in that
numinous way only great fiction can be. Enjoy.
December 2016 Indie Next List
“The intersection of world history and family history, the interplay of memory and imagination, a tangle of humor and grief, and the blurred and shifting line that separates sanity and madness all come into play in this stunning book. In the months before his death, Chabon's grandfather revealed much of his life to his grandson. On that foundation, Chabon has built a novel filled with family stories, World War II episodes -- including an appearance by Wernher von Braun -- an obsession with rocketry, and a vividly realized, against-all-odds love story. While all the characters are richly developed, the narrator's grandfather -- the brave, eccentric, anger-fueled, and deeply loving center of this novel -- will remain with readers forever.”
— Banna Rubinow (E), The River's End Bookstore, Oswego, NY
Top Ten
“A feeling of wonder pervades this captivating novelization of the mysterious lives of Chabon's grandfather and grandmother. This thrilling, poignant, and magical book left me feeling like I do when I leave the theater after a great movie-I couldn't talk; I just had to readjust to the world.”
— Tim Benz, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Crestview Hills, KY
Description
Following on the heels of his New York Times–bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.
About the Author
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
