very well written book with a great topic and such great pacing and plotting through the entire book... up until the end where it just felt as if it unforeseeable stopped in the middle of something and left me feeling uncompleted and wanting for more in a sad way.

This book was recommended to me by a customer.

I started reading it some time ago but put it down. Unfortunately it didn't pull me in enough to make me want to finish it.

I kept thinking i would start it again. Maybe I will and then find I love it. However now is not that time so regretfully I won't be finishing it.now.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced copy of this book, but waited until I reread on holiday to review. I have to put in a disclaimer – I love Michael Chabon. Love him. Except Telegraph Avenue, the last of his I read before this. The problem with loving an author is that you get really nervous about their new books (what if I hate this one? What if I hate it so much it puts me off all the previous ones?!) and so I wanted to be sure that I really did love Moonglow and didn’t just feel relief that he had returned to glowing form.

Moonglow begins with an author’s note that states “I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it”. The book blends facts and fiction as a writer called Mike Chabon listens to the deathbed confessions of his grandfather in this novel/memoir hybrid that unfurls in no particular chronological order and plays with our perspective at every turn.

This is not a dry exercise in literary fiction however, showcasing technical skill with no soul. We come to care deeply for the characters, and despite hurtling from Baltimore to Florida to Germany to a New York prison, forward and back from the 1940s to the present, it all feels effortless and surefooted. Chabon has such a particular way of describing objects vividly, and occasional sentences that stop the heart “She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand”.

If I had to sum this book up in one word it would be ‘Chabonesque’ – a stunning return to form from one of my all-time favourite authors.

Moonglow is published by 4th Estate (Harper Collins). I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review. I have tried Chabon before unsuccessfully so perhaps I should not have requested *Moonglow*. I gave it a try and just didn't have a good interest in it. I'm sure many others will disagree with me and enjoy it though!

In the usual disclaimer at the front of Moonglow, Michael Chabon says: ‘Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Scout’s honor.’

But we are not really expected to believe this: He is playing with the reader throughout. The book is narrated by Michael Chabon, and he is telling the long and complex story of his maternal grandparents. At the end of the book, and in the publicity for the book and reviews, we are told that this is partly fiction. Or a lot of fiction. Or a pack of lies. It is, apparently, up to the reader to decide what is true and what isn’t. This is extremely tiresome and pointless, but it seems to be quite a common trope in books these days.

I have loved some of Michael Chabon’s books very much: on the blog I have covered Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Telegraph Avenue, while his masterpiece (in my view) is Wonder Boys – two blog entries, an invented book for an April Fool’s entry, and high praise for the film and also the Bob Dylan video featuring footage from the film… ‘Truly Michael Chabon is a Wonder Boy’, I said. And there is also the marvellous Yiddish Policemen’s Union. (We have also featured his wife Ayelet Waldman and a couple of her books.)

So I’m putting off saying that I didn’t really like this book all that much. It was, of course, beautifully well-written, and funny at times, and there was an interesting story in there. But it was told at SUCH length, and in such a convoluted jumpy way, and with such long dull diversions – I couldn’t get on with it. We all have grandparents and they all have stories, but they don’t need to be told in such detail. I didn’t find it quirky and charming, I had to fight off that feeling of ‘How dare you assume I will be interested in this?’, and it is difficult. On it goes – not helped by his always referring to characters as ‘my grandfather’, ‘my grandmother’, ‘my mother’ – no names given. (One fact revealed early on in the book is that the grandfather is in fact no blood relation to Michael Chabon.)

I cannot emphasize enough how annoying is the whole business of its maybe being true, maybe not. I am truly not interested in any more novels like that.


In its favour: Chabon is very good at telling you what people are wearing. I particularly liked the grandfather in his shorts, polo shirts, and sandals and socks - ‘he looked like the retired director of a Zionist summer camp.’

And I loved the housecoat – which is at it happens has been a subject much discussed on the Clothes in Books twitter timeline this week. Not this book, the whole idea of housecoats, along with that other great CiB favourite, bedjackets. So that is why I picked out this part of the book to illustrate.

Naturally on Twitter I was lecturing:
Housecoats can vary in formality and glamour, but the key element: no corset or stays underneath.
They have often featured on the blog –
‘the graceful full-skirted blue velvet housecoat’ in this 1950s book, the surprising orange one at a party here, and a splendid discussion of housecoats – and the original use of this picture to the right – in the blog entry on Margery Sharp’s blissful book The Innocents.

Michael Chabon once wrote a children’s book on baseball, Summerland, which is as close to unreadable as any book I have ever attempted, so I have hopes that yet again I can ignore one book and like his next…
http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/dress-down-sunday-moonglow-by-michael.html

Ten percent fact and ninety percent fiction, says Michael Chabon of his latest novel, which is based loosely on his own grandparents’ lives and is a mix of invented and real-life characters. The novel takes the form of a memoir. The author’s grandfather is on his deathbed, and, his tongue loosened by his pain medication, begins to recount the story of his life, instructing his grandson to write it all down. At the book’s heart is the love story between the grandparents and a family saga, but it is also an exploration of the ever-present Holocaust, mental illness, rocket science and most of all the nature of truth and memory and storytelling itself, the memories and secrets that make up all our lives and whether we can ever be sure we have remembered the true version of what we think we know. Not plot-driven, but more a series of episodes from the lives of the characters, and not chronologically ordered, the novel wanders across geography and time and is peppered with many digressions and anecdotes. All in all it’s an absorbing and compelling narrative, although I found the inconsistent pace and some of the digressions wearying at times. The writing is exuberant and vivid and the characters memorable and the mix of fact and fiction cleverly integrated. I particularly enjoyed the examination of the American space programme which was so heavily reliant on German expertise, and the account of Operation Paperclip, in which 1500 German engineers, scientists and technicians from post-Nazi Germany were recruited to work for the Americans, a story which is not widely known. Wide-ranging and inventive, insightful and thought-provoking, it’s a novel that I’m pretty sure would reward a second reading.

Of course Chabon is an artist in words and I was drawn in to the story of these people's lives - but I always have sense of its almost being a writer from a creative writing course or something - i read his earlier works with great pleasure and i can still see the skill in the writing but the earlier ones , for me, had more passion in them - the wry sense of 'what a character' (for example) the grandfather is - just sort of undermined my engagement - but he sure knows how to write.

Michael Chabon pulls off a hybrid memoir and a contested fictional multigenerational family history peppered with anecdotes and stories from his heavily medicated grandfather on his deathbed. Chabon unashamedly states its fictional roots and perhaps questions the concept of a factual memoir, how much of a memoir can be said to true when peoples' memories are notoriously unreliable? Can a memoir be free from an agenda? How much is the truth embellished to create a compelling life history? How free is it from the desire to create a particular picture of an individual whilst diminishing or erasing other aspects? I came away from reading this feeling that in this case it barely matters which bricks of this fabled reconstruction of family history are true and which are false. What mattered to me is the warmth, passion, vibrancy, imagination and humour with which the web of stories are told, the love and affection that drive the need in the author to document his maternal grandfather's life as he is dying, serving the purpose of tangibly memorialising and honouring a life on the cusp of passing on. Particularly as his grandfather talks of his life amounting to little, the temporary nature of life and that whilst he was always starting things, he never finished them. I for one am not going to forget this book.

I was entranced by the lyrical prose and the vivid metaphors in the narrative. The stories of efforts to strangle Alger Hiss with ripped out telephone cables which lands the grandfather in a New York prison, blowing up bridges, sex, war time espionage and efforts attempting to locate Nazi SS officer Wernher Von Braun in Europe only to find he ends up working for the US space programme, There is the obsession with rockets and a lovely story of the exploits of Ramon the cat and the hunt for the snake. It appears the outpouring of tales is chaotic and non linear, but this is often the nature of memory, going back and forth in time. What is particularly tender and heartbreaking is the recounting of the love and loyalty he has for Chabon's grandmother, her desperate and traumatic history and the consequent mental instability that ensued. There is the examination of what constitutes family with the inclusion of non blood family members.

The exuberance of the prose render the novel never less than compelling reading. It matters not one whit if the entire book comprises of nothing but fiction. As you may have gathered I fell in love with Moonglow. A fantastic and moving read that I highly recommend. Many thanks to HarperCollins 4th Estate for an ARC.

Chabon knows how to tell a tale. Moonglow is the exquisite account of his grandfather's life as he tells it on his deathbed and interpreted through the author's exquisite prose. His grandfather's story is at once remarkable and ordinary touching on any number of historical events and topics and reminding us that despite the hardships, happiness can always be found in the cracks.

Librarything (and Litsy)

This is a long, meandering novel masquerading as a memoir: it flits around in time and place so that the chapters don't follow consecutively and it's only gradually that we build up a picture of the narrator's family history via the stories told to him by his dying grandfather. Despite the post-modern affectations (historical truth vs fictional truth, fragmented narrative, a narrator who takes the name of but isn't the real-life author himself) there's real heart here which lifts this beyond merely the clever-clever construction and gives it a haunting, poignant substance.

At the heart of the book for me is not so much 'my grandfather' (never named) but the beautiful, damaged woman with whom he falls in love: 'she was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out'. Profoundly affected by her experiences during WW2, the narrator's grandmother tells stories to shore up her own sense of self and to hold herself together in the wake of trauma.

While the story shifted for me between the enthralling and the tedious, Chabon's gorgeous writing carried me through: he moves effortlessly from the rambunctious humour of the opening scene where the grandfather tries to garotte his boss with a ripped out telephone cable to the lyrical, elegiac, distressing scenes with the grandmother. Along the way, we're treated to a meditation on families and what constitutes a family when it's not based on blood, on history and its aftermaths, on memory and stories. In less accomplished hands this might have had its mawkish and sentimental moments but Chabon side-steps them with something far more authentic. A big-hearted and beautifully-written novel.