Moonglow

By Michael Chabon

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.

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 ranges from the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York's Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of 'the American Century'. Collapsing an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week, Moonglow is 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460707852

Michael Chabon

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.

Reviews for Moonglow

[deeehmm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A confusing story... I had my warm, glowy moments with it but could not finish it. Hope to take it to the beach one day.

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moonglow is a novel that is written to sound as if it were a memoir about the life of the author’s late grandfather. Through the vignettes that the grandfather related over the last two weeks of his life, we learn what happened during his lifetime and how he felt about it. But this book is not meant to be entirely truthful; as Chabon writes in an Author’s Note preceding the book:“In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.”Thus, he claims, it is his "“first faux-memoir novel.” He also declared in an interview about the book:"It is an attempt to explain an enigmatic advertisement I found in a copy of an issue of Esquire magazine in 1958 for Chabon Scientific Company that sold a model rocket. This memoir is the fictional history behind that advertisement to explain it."In previous books, Michael Chabon has proven to be a master of the meticulously wrought phrase. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, for example, his evocation of New York life in the 1930’s was absolutely rhapsodic. I didn't feel that this book rose to that level, although Chabon adroitly captures the subtleties of the grandfather’s life in a panorama that spans World War II, marriage to his wife (presumably Chabon's grandmother), the post-war race for scientific hegemony, the ways in which the grandfather spent his retirement, and finally, his deathbed conversations with his grandson in 1989. It is both a chronicle of an individual life and of the broader era in which that life was lived.Evaluation: Some of the themes Chabon has used before reappear in this book, such as of the impotency of men in the face of evil, the appeal of storytelling in reshaping memory, the ways in which imagination can help make reality endurable, and the redemptive power of love.Yet, although Chabon conjures this grandfather’s life so vividly, the story just did not engage me that much on an emotional level. Nor did the author wow me, as in the past, with his magical flights of prose.I thought this was a good book, but because this author has written some great books, I found it disappointing.

[mahsdad · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A memoir/novel of a "Michael Chabon" telling the story of his grandfather's life while on his deathbed. From his time in WWII, to his obsession with rockets and Werner von Braun, and the trials of his mentally ill wife. Its a very poignant story that seems all too real, but was only loosely based on his real grandfather. He was inspired to begin writing the novel when he saw a vintage ad for a model rocket company called Chabon Scientific, a company he or no one in his family had ever heard of. Chabon is one of my favorite writers, so it was a must read for me, and a good one it was as well.This edition was purchased at Hudson Books in an airport somewhere and the introductory letter Chabon wrote to Hudson's customers, was hilarious and almost worth the price of the book alone.My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.As soon as he elevator doors closed and we started to go up, I felt a djinn of expectancy or dread (there was no difference) flicker to life in by belly.8/10 S: 10/15/18 - 11/16/18 (33 Days)

[dknight0918 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It took me a while to read it because I enjoyed it and did not want to finish it. Hope Chabon releases another book within the next couple of years. Reading this one also made me miss my grandpa so much.

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was anxious about reading this, as I loved The Yiddish Policeman's Union and The WonderBoys. This apparent biography of the author's grandfather, told in an unapologetically rambling style, encounters space and Nazis. Chabon takes us from wartime Germany to modern day retirement Florida and back,laughing I. The face of an orderly timeline, watching rockets explode and exploring the nature of society's, industry's responsibilities for the horrors perpetuated in the name of scientific advance. A great read, with laugh out loud moments.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So today Kellyanne Conway said that the President and his Press Secretary don't lie, they use "alternative facts." This construct, a moral whitewashing of the concept of lying, is terrifying in the POTUS, but in literature it is charming and challenging and incredibly effective. It lets the writer inform the reader about the truth of the people about whom they are writing without having to deal with those inconvenient facts that can cloud the character analysis. Here this works perfectly in Chabon's warts and all love letter to his grandfather (whom I do not recall having a name.) I was left feeling that I knew Chabon's grandfather, grandmother, mother, and perhaps most of all Chabon himself. While the alternative facts of our current POTUS are there to avoid the truth, Chabon's alternative facts are there to get the reader to the most stripped down profound truth. Chabon makes himself incredibly vulnerable here (slightly behind the scrim provided by his grandfather's life, but still visible.) The willingness to take that risk is admirable, and it paid off with this astonishingly great book.When Chabon is great, no one can touch him, and here he is at his greatest. I never thought he could write a better book than Kavelier & Clay, but I think he did just that. This book is so many things. First, it is a book about family and about how the family that goes all in are the center of the universe. Second, and most obviously it is love letter to his grandfather, a true iconoclast who is a cross between Job, Leo Szilard, and Preston Tucker. Fourth, it is about mental illness and the monumental toll it takes on those in the orbit of the ill person. Fifth, this is a book about the effects of war, the way in which it changes people at a cellular level, impacting every aspect of their own lives and those of their progeny. Sixth, it is about love and hate and class and race and sex and desire, and about how our personal responses to touch and taste and scent are destiny. And finally, it is about how cats always triumph in the end.ETA its also incredibly laugh.out loud funny. Tragic too, and sometimes a little slow, like life.

[c.archer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Michael Chabon is a true wordsmith! This book is beautifully written and witty as hell. His characters jump off the page. Highly recommended!

[nivramkoorb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Michael Chabon is a great writer. His prose and creativity are among the best of any author writing today. I have read all of his fiction and would probably read a shopping list if he published one. That being said I found this book a slow tough read. The book is positioned as a memoir about his grandfather and whether or not it is fiction or fact is not important. The chronology is all over the map and this made it difficult to get a good flow. This is a death bed narrative between Chabon and his mother's father so the story contains many elements from his grandfather's life. The book is full of real characters from history and deals with World War II, the holocaust, the space race, gangsters, prison etc. There is so much detail that it tends to take away from the books flow. Chabon is so good at prose that he seems to get caught up in his own skill to the detriment of the story. For those who have never read Chabon, I suggest starting with his Pulitzer prize winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I also loved his previous novel "Telegraph Avenue". If you like those then read everything by him.

[suesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The writing in this so-called memoir is amazing! Chabon provides so many details I felt I knew the characters well, and I definitely felt for them. The book had more interest for me because it was based on real characters. However, I did not need as many details regarding the grandfather's wartime and space-related experiences.

[kcshankd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Indiespensable. This is the first Chabon I've read, and I liked this quite a bit, and ended up racing for the end but not wanting to reach it. My only complaint is the disjointed - time-sequence bit that is becoming ever more popular. It is off-putting to have to realign the narrative in time with a new chapter, and rarely necessary. It seems a fad, just tell the story please.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Memoir, fictional novel, exaggerations or just Chabon's musings, whichever way you choose to look at it, just know this book was written with a great deal of love. It shines through in the writing.As his grandfather laid dying he shared stories of his life with his grandson. Let me tell you this man lived many different lives, tried to kill his boss, blow up a bridge, spent time in prison, worked for the space program designing model rockets and loved and married a woman with mental difficulties. The novel goes back and forth, different stages of his grandfathers life, Michael discussing these thongs with his mother, his mother's recollections and his grandmother's forays into mental illness. I did think the coverage of rockets, which was his grandfather's passion always, was somewhat too lengthy, and I admit to skimming some of these sections. Yet, the other events in his life more than made up for this, it was all so interesting, almost voyeuristic, looking into someone's personal history. The funny and coincidental thing about this is that the only other book of Chabons that I read, Wonder Boys, featured a snake. A snake was also an important part of this book, occurring in his grandfather's life before he found out he was sick. Rockets and snakes? Well this is Chabon after all.ARC from publisher.

[phyllis.shepherd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Michael Chabon pretty clearly tells us in the beginning that this is fiction, probably not even semi-autobiographical, but reviewers are stumbling all over themselves trying to figure out whether this is true, and, if so, why so much personal detail is revealed. It is the mark of a great novelist that he doesn't simply demand a willing suspension of disbelief, he bends truth, lies, and history in ways that have his readers tied in knots and loving every minute of it. Remarkable.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A bit of a slow start, but once I felt I got to know the characters, it became fascinating on several levels. The basis for the story is a dying Jewish grandfather speaking on his death bed (over the course of days/weeks) to his grandson, the author. The book reads as if it is a memoir of the grandfather who was a young soldier during WWII. Not told in chronological order, the story goes all over the place from war torn France to a retirement resort in Florida. Along the way, rockets and space play a part as well as a fascinating history and look at Wernher von Braun -- history with the Nazi and his place in the American space program. Grandfather also tells about his relationship with his wife, a French woman suffering from mental illness (the skinless horse), and her daughter who was raised as his own. The background of the wife is different than the one that Grandfather believes. As with "Kavalier and Clay" there are many characters, real and fictional, who appear throughout the story. It was an interesting and fun read.

[doondeck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book just got better as you went along. Wonderful character development and beautiful background descriptions. Clearly the presence of the moon was in so many scenes, but what was the significance of the matches on the cover?

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Chabon calls this a memoir but admits to inventing "with abandon"; his publisher calls this a novell. Either way, it is a fabulous story with love, conflict, tragedy and happy outcomes all tangled together. Maybe his best book yet.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Much has been made in reviews and interviews of the fact that Moonglow is a fictionalized account of Michael Chabon's maternal grandfather's life. I'm less interested in what Chabon is doing to blur the line between fiction and memoir than I am in whether Moonglow worked as a story. And it did. Chabon's a talented writer working at his peak and so the writing here is fine and stays out of the way of the story he's telling, which is the story of his own family tree, mainly focusing on his grandfather, and using the framing device of Chabon spending time with his grandfather during his grandfather's final days and the conversations they had.What emerges is a straight-forward novel about an interesting man with the framing device of their conversations before he dies. The story is mostly chronological, with some jumping back and forth in time, from his childhood as a Jewish boy running around places he wasn't allowed, to his involvement in trying to find German scientists before the Soviets do at the end of WWII, to how he met his wife and their life together, and his life as a widower in Florida. In many ways, he lived an ordinary life, but in others he was extraordinary; in his devotion to the wife who never fully recovered from her life in France during the war, in his feeling of obligation to a German man who is being bullied in prison, to his fascination with the space race. Chabon writes with an enormous amount of affection about his grandfather, and that sentiment pervades the novel. It's also, at a more basic level, just a good story about an interesting, yet ordinary man, well-told.

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Michael Chabon's exceptional writing is once again apparent in this autobiographical novel about his own grandfather's experiences. This is a family saga as recounted by the narrator's grandfather on his deathbed, induced by medications and urgency, and it also the description of the times and places inhabited mid-twentieth century by this Jewish family. Readers will want to savor Chabon's language, with such phrases as "a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps." Highly recommended!

[pmaurer_11 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Couldn't get into this one. Disjointed memoir of the author's grandfather, moving between a variety of time periods and surrounding characters.

[jennyo_587543 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book. As you'll see from some of my other reviews, I think Chabon's a genius, a captivating storyteller, and an extraordinary wordsmith. My opinion certainly didn't change after reading this book.I will say it took me forEVER to read it. I have no idea why. Normally, I pick up a Chabon book and ignore life around me until I finish it. This one took me the better part of three months to read. I don't know whether to attribute that to the busy nature of my life at the time I was trying to read it, or to the fact that the book is episodic in nature, so it was easy to read a bit, set it aside for a little while, and then come back to it. I'm going to guess the former.Regardless, the book is wonderful. And I can't help wondering how much of the story was real, how much Chabon's actual family resembles the family in the book.I've somehow forgotten how to specifically review a book. I'll just say that I loved this one mainly because Chabon creates fully fleshed out, believable characters who you can't help caring about. You want to know what happens to them and why they make the choices they do. You feel something when you read his books.I'm sure I'll get Chabon's next book as soon as it's available. He's one of my all-time favorites.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful novel Chabon is a great writer and this novel, which involves a grandfather's tale of his time at war and as an engineer, is great. I had no idea until I read the reviews that the story is entirely made up.,The scenes are wonderful, especially the ones with his grandmother, who is a total nutcase. For some reason, Alger Hiss figures here, but he disappears after a first page and then another reference.

[ebt1002 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this novel. It took some getting used to, the lurching narrative pace, the narrator's use of "my grandfather" and "my mother" to denote characters rather than ever establishing them by name, these initially created a disjointed reading experience. But, once the characters took on their full three-dimensionality, I was enchanted and engrossed. Mike's grandfather is dying of cancer and Mike manages to persuade him to tell his story, the story of Mike's family history. Most of the story centers around his grandfather's efforts during WWII to track down the inventor of the V-2, a rocket with a murderous purpose but also one important chapter in the complicated history of rocketry and space exploration. That history serves as a parallel to the history of the family; some might find it distracting but for me it served as the anchor for the grandfather's life. His passion for rocketry feels so real, so imperative to his character. His love for his wife (Mike's grandmother) and his acts of heroism and cowardice in various moments of his young adult life make a good story. But the thread of rocketry and its intersections with those heroic and cowardly and passionate moments is what pulls it all together. That said, this novel is not about rockets or rocketry. It is a family saga and a poignant story of the devastating effect of war. It is the story of mental illness born of deep trauma. It is the story of love and loss, anger and aging. And it's brilliant.

[schant-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing. From reviews I hoped for a return to the glory days of Kavalier & Klay or Yiddish Policemen's Union but the story was dry and rambling and the characters uninteresting. It's still very readable because of the beautiful was he uses language, but not his best.

[porch_reader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although Moonglow is labeled a novel, it is based on stories that Michael Chabon's grandfather told him during the weeks before his death. But Chabon adds his own imagination to the stories, resulting in a book that the dust jacket refers to as speculative autobiography. Told in snapshots that do not always follow chronological order, the story moves from his time in World War II to his challenging marriage to his fascination with the space program and his life in a Florida retirement village. The events are fascinating, but it is the way that the events fit together to create a portrait of a man who, while far from perfect, was clearly deeply loved. Chabon also has a way with words, and I found myself lingering over his well-worded observations. In all, a very satisfying read.

[syrsynlib · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A tour-de-force of narrative and character development, Moonglow combines family history--and its inevitable secrets--with gripping historical settings. This is Michael Chabon at his best.

[sirroger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moonglow is a fictional memoir based on Chabon's conversations with his grandfather just before his death. In the memoir, the narrator tells about his grandfather's eventful life, much of the details of which he did not know until those deathbed conversations. His grandfather grew up in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia, served in Germany during the war, and on returning home, married a French refugee with a daughter (the narrator's grandmother and mother). He worked a couple of sales jobs, spent some time in prison, and retired in Florida after his wife's eventual death from cancer. Other family skeletons wear the clothes of mental illness, revenge, and grief, with a possible side of mafia-related criminal activity (on the part of the narrator's father.)Due to the author's note where he mentions all the liberties taken with facts and memories, I expected to experience some ambiguity about what was true, but still approached this story from the perspective of it being about Michael Chabon's real life and family. I didn't realize until reading the excellent interview in the back, that it's basically all fiction. A sort of fiction in the guise of a memoir. Perhaps there's a certain voyeuristic intent in reading any biography, so maybe this will change how people read it, whether they know. At any rate, I'm still not entirely sure, but not surprised, knowing Chabon's tendency to blur genre lines.I love Chabon's writing, but I was ready to give this one three stars after not being as engaged with the beginning as I'd like. As it went on, and especially toward the end, I did get into the story more, and now I think I was probably just too distracted during those first few chapters, and couldn't give it my full attention. The audiobook reader is good, but Chabon does so much with subtle metaphor and intricate wordplay, that perhaps it's best taken in with a print copy.It hasn't displaced my top Chabon favorites, but it's still very good overall, and I will read it again someday.

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really struggled with this book and the nonlinear, disjointed nature of this novel likely didn't help much. In short, this novel is narrated by a grandson who is remembering what he knows about his grandparents' lives during WWII and the Cold War. Not always told in chronological order, this book can be frustrating, but it does provide an original perspective and evokes the tension of the historical era well.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great mishmash of a novel. It didn't grip me straight away, but after I tuned in to the themes (and got my head around the timeline) I was rewarded with an excellent story of love, ambition, Jews and the Moon. A fine book to remind us all that old people weren't always old - and being old isn't being dead, either..!

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent! So well written, but subtly so. A very interesting twist of one story running with four or five threads in time (current, recent past, past, distant past, far distant past) all slowly revealing more and more of a man's life and story:led and heart ache. He is a flawed but admirable person who loves a broken woman. if the author made up the whole thing, genius. If it really is based on real life, it is still so believable in its incredulity. Really, you can't make this stuff up. The running theme of space travel and the moon works well. Beautiful writing, with excellent descriptions that are detailed but never schmaltzy or over done, but still so poetic and picture-painting.Amazing diction, comic relief. This one is a winner.

[jreynolds1959 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a beautifully written volume. The verbiage is so wonderful to read.What a wonderful way to honor a grandfather. Michael Chabon's grandfather is dying and Michael is listening to the stories that the man is sharing with him about his life, which includes stories about his grandmother, mother, etc. I was so taken by this story, that I was compelled numerous times to Google information about World War II references, rockets references, Jewish references, etc. In doing so, I learned many things that I didn't know about a lot of things. Great tribute, even if it is considered fiction.

[j_j_k-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent story that features clear prose and a compelling narrative. The nonsequential timing of rhte story is one of my favorite devices.