Quasi-metafictional memoir, based upon the deathbed confessions of Chabon's grandfather in the late 1980s. Engaging story about the grandfather's exploits in Germany as part of the T-force during WW2, Operation Paperclip, and Operation Hydra; his obsession with rocketry and Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun; his model building, prison escape, amateur rocket construction, and about a cat "who may have eaten, or been eaten by a python or an alligator." Mentions of the Moonglow song, and the stories Metzengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe, and Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement, and informs the reader of St Dominic de Guzmán as being the patron saint of astronomers, and how Hermann Oberth's book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923) started the rocket mania in Germany. ( )

Michael Chabon often admits to using his life and family in his novels, and this is definitely no exception. The narrator, 'Mike', is a writer who is listening to his dying grandfather relate his life, something he never would do before. The stories, of his childhood, experience in World War II, his wife, his work, and all the dramatic incidents therein are told in what seems like no particular order, but ultimately the reader can see how one story relates to another. Chabon is a wonderful storyteller, and his characters are people I wish I could know. The narration is terrific. ( )

I liked 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay', but this was not my cup of tea. In general, the writing was good and the premise was interesting, but the characters were more sad than interesting. I did find the continual use of footnotes to be quite distracting. Not sure why some of the text was included as footnotes, it is not like it was not part of the main narrative.

The fact that this was a work of fiction somewhat raised the bar on what I expected from a story. This felt artificially disjointed and I had a hard time caring about any of the characters except the narrator. I reached a point where I felt like this was not what I wanted to be thinking about so I put it aside. ( )

Stop me, oh oh oh, stop me, stop me if you think that you've heard this one before - an old man on his deathbed tells the story of his life in time hopping fragments. His mad wife tormented by the Skinless Horse was more interesting to me, with the huge deception buried in her past - Oh, who said she lied, because she never, she never, who said she'd lied because she never? ( )

3.5, some parts beautiful, some contrived. There was a lot that reminded me of my own family story, and perhaps that is also why I feel reserved in my praise for the book. ( )

Chabon's novel is a fictional memoir of the narrator's maternal grandfather. The grandfather was a mechanically gifted but easily angered young man with a consuming interest in rocketry and space travel. He ends up in a form of secret military special forces looking for V2 assets for the US in Germany after WWII. He meets his future wife after the war. She is a war-damaged apparent holocaust survivor with a daughter by a previous marriage. The vicissitudes of this family related in a partially time shifted account is the structure of the novel. Chabon is a pleasure to read, and his Jewish mixture of comedy and tragedy is compelling. In an interview at the end of the text, Chabon admits that the memoir's grandfather has many of his own characteristics. He comments that, "My stories are all .... tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat." and "by being almost completely fiction, the book manages to get at essential truths about himself that memoir would not have been able to access." ( )

This book is my second by Michael Chabon; the first being [b:The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay|3985|The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay|Michael Chabon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479660066s/3985.jpg|2693329]. Of the two, I definitely preferred Moonglow, but somehow I can't quite decide if I like Chabon or not. Here, he tells the story of this grandfather, and it isn't quite clear what is fictional and what is true. Regardless, the grandfather is an interesting man who is obsessed with the moon and the idea of colonizing it. During World War II, he becomes determined to hunt down the Nazi scientist who created the V-2 rocket, using concentration camp laborers. He is married to a mentally ill woman with whom he is deeply in love.

These stories are interwoven with the current time period where the grandfather is dying of cancer.

Chabon jumps around in time and between storylines. This type of non-linear storytelling never seems to turn me on. As soon as I start getting engaged in one aspect of the story, the story shifts, inevitably to something of lesser interest. Something about the way Chabon starts his chapters often fails to suck me in, and that's a shame, because he does dialogue and character development really, really well. He also is excellent at weaving in a strong literary theme (even if he does hit you over the head with it a bit).

This book teetered toward the four star realm for me, but it was so easy for me to put it down that I knew I just wasn't really engaged completely.

Tip: Some chapters that start with a few paragraphs of dullness turned out to be really important. I skimmed them, and that was a mistake. Chapters 22-24 are critical, and I ended up needing to go back and re-read. ( )

Fictional account of part of the narrator’s grandfather’s life, as told from his hospital bed during his last days. Filled with non-linear vignettes, portions of the story relate to such diverse topics as WWII, the American space program, mental illness, a New York prison experience, and a python on the loose in Florida. After reading another of the Chabon’s books that I enjoyed immensely, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was disappointed to find this book a bit of a jumble. I was not inspired to care about the characters, the story jumped around so much that it was hard to recall where the last bit left off, and certain episodes appeared to have no discernable point. It contains unnecessary references to bodily functions, his grandfather’s sexual activities, and vulgarity. Early on we are led to believe the grandmother was in a concentration camp during WWII but no one ever asks how her baby daughter would have survived such a camp. Ultimately, I found it a promising concept that led nowhere. ( )

2022 book #50. 2016. The author tells the (maybe true) story of his grandfather who led an interesting, if excentric life. Told in a non-chronological order it was hard to follow at times but an enjoyable story anyway. ( )

Supposedly, in 1989, Chabon spent a week visiting his dying grandfather and the stories the older man imparted about his life inspired this book. This is a wonderful book, and much as I wanted, as I was reading it, to believe it all basically happened, Chabon has called this a work of fiction. The events might have sprung from Chabon's imagination, but the emotions resonate as universal truths about family, love, and self.

I found myself thinking a lot about my father, born a decade after the "grandfather" of the novel. My father, a space buff like the "grandfather," also served during World War II and also kept his feelings close to him. There were many moments in the book that brought forth a memory of my own, from a simple dinner of salami and eggs to "The Whip," a mobile amusement park ride in a truck. I'm not a reader who seeks to identify with characters and situations, but when it creeps up on me, it's an added pleasure.

And by the end of the book, as implausible as much of it seemed, I wanted it to all be real. Whatever sparks of reality inspired this decades-spanning story doesn't really matter. Chabon is an amazing storyteller and this is an amazing book. ( )

This is a fictionalized account of the life of the author's grandfather. It is written as a memoir taken from deathbed confessions. Admittedly, it is all made up. In interviews, Chabon states that you can actually find a lot of himself in the grandfather's character.

It is the story of a man who lived a full life and who did have a couple of great passions--his beautiful but mentally ill wife, and his love for the idea of space travel. The majority of his life was devoted to both of these pursuits.

The grandfather and his haunted wife both carry scars from World War II. She endured personal trauma after losing her innocence and entire family to the Nazis. This affected her health over the years and required multiple stints in mental hospitals, thereby affecting the rest of the family; namely, "the grandfather" and his stepdaughter.

He was a Jewish-American soldier who never got over the loss of a great friend during the war or by his disillusionment about the true character of one of his long-time (science) heroes, the creator of the V-2 rocket, Werner Von Braun, who was a member of the Nazi Party and was (shamefully) snatched up by Americans at the end of the war in order to give us an edge in the Space Race against the Russians. There is a segment of the story about the grandfather's time spent in Germany during WWII including meeting a priest who just so happens to also have a focused interest in space travel and has a surprise stowed away inside a barn.

The grandfather has a stint in prison after trying to kill his employer and once again, finds a like-minded soul with a fondness for astronomy. This friendship leads to a future employment opportunity for the grandfather who later builds model rockets for N.A.S.A. It's all very Forrest Gump-like but it works.

The story itself is not fast moving nor necessarily exciting; however, the writing style is incredible and you cannot help but get drawn in by the characters of the grandfather and his wife. As they age and near the time of their demise, you grieve for them and feel for the author/narrator's loss, as if this were actually the story of his real family. ( )

Masterful, subtle and deep and very enjoyable. ( )

I liked how the strands of history (political, personal, cultural) are drawn together to tell this tale. I love a lightly fictionalized memoir. It frees the writer up to put emphasis on what is important to them. I learned things and read bits aloud to my husband.

Why no names? 'My grandfather' interacting with 'my grandmother' and 'my mother' got confused in my head a few times. But it's his family and I'm sure he has his reasons. ( )

Michael Chabon writes with such engaging originality and imagination that I’d read anything he puts out. This novel combines a look at the complex relationships in his own family with some of the historical events of the 20th century. In writing about the people in his own family, he shows how world history affects generations in very personal ways, or how the personal often reflects profound social issues.
There’s a lot of beautiful writing here, with the moon and rocketry a symbol for the escape from the difficulties and horrors of life on earth. Similarly, a lot of Chabon’s images are so stark or unusual that they stick in the mind – the hermaphrodite in the trailer, for example, the conversations with the German priest, the dream of the horse, the snake hunt. These seem a lot of disparate images, but Chabon uses them to highlight the memorable story of his grandfather’s life.
Chabon’s grandfather wants to escape from the antisemitism and poverty of the USA in the 1920s and ’30s, and from the isolation that he seems to experience even within his own community. He joins the army, but is sent to join an intelligence unit. What he finds in searching for the U2 rocket construction sites leaves him unable to separate the aeronautical dream from the slave labour death camps overseen by rocketeer Wernher von Braun. This becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with a French refugee who is dealing with mental health issues that were compounded by – or maybe rose out of – her experiences in the war. Finally, he comes face to face with von Braun at an astronautics conference, and feels nothing for him but pity. In the end, Chabon concludes, his grandfather found love and outlived von Braun.
The role of storytelling is one of the themes in this novel, as it was in other books by Chabon. Storytelling offers a way to make sense of one’s life, as Chabon’s grandfather seems to be trying to do. It’s also a way to create a new life, as both his grandmother and von Braun have chosen to do. Chabon sees this as a house of cards: the stories his grandfather tells are pieces of some kind of building, although the building is unstable and prone to falling apart. Nevertheless, putting them together allows Chabon to find a kind of order in the bizarre series of events that he discovers make up his own family.
The links between fiction and reality is another theme in Chabon’s writing that comes out here. The book’s subtitle says that this is a novel, although it reads as a fairly straightforward retelling of his grandfather’s last days. Chabon’s gift as a writer is to make even the bizarre seem realistic. But perhaps the subtitle is merely meant to explain imagined lines of dialogue that Chabon wasn’t present for, or to provide a cover for the criminal events that he describes. (Family meetings might be difficult if he has to justify all the stories in the book.) But it made me wonder how much of this story is made up, as I did in Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay book. It also leads to the question of how much conventional history is a story. The whitewashed story of Werner von Braun and the American rocket program, for example, was clearly embellished to suit the needs and political objectives of the time.
Not long ago, I read The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald, which has surprising parallels to this novel. Both seem to use elements of the authors’ family lives to explore the compromised history of the rocket programs of Germany and the United States, within a complex social context that includes family lies, racism, sexual abuse and criminality. Both are powerful reflections on the ideals of the space race coming into conflict with personal and political ends, and by extension with the idealistic stories we tell ourselves and the reality they hide. ( )

This is a solid effort from Chabon, an improvement over his overindulgent Telegraph Avenue. Here, he delivers a "memoir" (of dubious truthfulness) of his grandparents' relationship, as revealed to him at the end of his grandfather's life. The story jumps through time (though one core story proceeds largely sequentially), place, and perspective, as Chabon writes from both his own present day point of view and a third person POV centered on his grandfather. It's funny, if a little on the self-knowing side, but it isn't a funny book; it's a blackly humorous sad story of crime, mental illness, and family secrets. ( )

adult fiction (ww2/holocaust/family secrets partly inspired by stories told by the author's family).

I only got to p. 142 (ch 13); I really enjoy reading Chabon's fantastic, dream-like adventures, but will come back to this when I have more time (and when there aren't 100 people waiting for this library copy). This has received a lot of great reviews so I can definitely recommend it in the meantime. ( )

In the final weeks if his grandfather's life, the author spends time listening to his most important life stories. Chabon brings his excellent prose to the undertaking. A passionate marriage to a Holocaust survivor with serious mental illness, a beloved daughter, a wartime hunt and lifelong hatred for Werner von Braun, a brief stint in prison, and a lifelong fascination with rockets comprise the primary threads of his grandfather's life tapestry. What a complex and fascinating life! Excellent read! ( )

Okay, I went in with the healthy dose of skepticism that always accompanies me when I pick up a book that has been praised to the rafters. Also, although I am in awe of Chabon's command of vocabulary, his short stories have consistently disappointed me; I always think he should quit 4/5 of the way through, and he never does. But Moonglow captivated me, apart from a bit of obsessiveness over rockets. A mystery, a character study, a family novel, a trick, truth and fiction mixed together as a fictional memoir of someone else's history. ( )

In this novel disguised as a memoir, the narrator, Mike recounts his grandfather's life as pieced together during his life, but largely filled in during his dying days. The narrator often recedes to the background as his grandfather's tale takes over, providing details he could have no way of knowing and it's a little hard to believe they could be remembered so thoroughly. But thorough it is, providing examples from his grandfather's boyhood that reveal him to be both a rogue and a softy -- he had no use for mindless standard conventions and rules, but he also couldn't abide injustice and was always on the lookout for someone to save. His choice of wife was a case in point: mentally fragile, physically beautiful, a seeming survivor of a WWII concentration camp by the tattoo on her arm, he falls quickly and deeply in love with her and her young daughter (Mike's mother) refugees of war. He himself fought in special ops in the War, being among the early liberators of Germany and on the hunt for Nazi leaders, particularly those associated with the development of rockets, like Werner Von Braun. History is deftly mixed with fiction in his accounts of that era, and the description of his grandfather's obsession with and respect for space and gadgetry forms a spiritual backbone of the novel. As an agnostic Jew, his grandfather had little other use for faith. Mike adds his own memories of his grandparents from when he was little -- his fear/discomfort with Mamie's mood swings, tarot cards, and stories and he prods a bit at his mother's experience of living with Uncle Ray, a hipster rabbi and con man, during the 50s when her mother was in a mental health institution and her father was in jail -- another interesting facet to this man's colorful, though unobtrusive life. The story telescopes skillfully and humorously between the recent past: the years Mike's grandfather lived without his grandmother after her death to cancer, during which he lives in a FL retirement community, becomes involved with Sally and goes on another saving crusade for her cat lost in the Everglades, and is a special employee of NASA, building scale models of rockets, space craft and even a lunar settlement-- and the distant past: his grandfather's childhood, war experience, early job and business ventures. Like a satellite, the story makes a complete arc to tie up nicely with a fuller understanding and appreciation for Mike and his mother of the complex man his grandfather was and the Forrest Gump-like ways he intersected with 20th century history. He comes to a deeper understanding of himself and his family too. ( )

Such an absolute joy to read. Delightful mastery of the English language, with prose that shines like poetry. ( )

This was lovely and bittersweet and complicated, which I kind of expect from Chabon but how lovely (etc.) it was blew me away. The characters are so brightly realized, the story and memories feel so true, and I’m certain this is actually a memoir, or so close to being one it’s nearly the same thing. The structure, too, plays into that, flowing smoothly through time and resonating with itself in unique and beautiful ways, like the motif of space travel that pops up where you least expect it. A lot of the fun, for me at least, was piecing together the fragments of memory into a more complete narrative, and I can’t buck the feeling that this is in many ways a eulogy, and in other ways, Chabon himself piecing together his family history along with us.

So that’s the feel of it. The story itself is rich and vibrant, full of joy and pain, success and tragedy, and otherwise hard to describe. It more or less traces the life of Chabon’s maternal grandfather (assuming this is a memoir) from childhood to final days, and the life of his maternal grandmother as viewed through family recollection—but that undersells it by a long shot, because their lives, my goodness, their lives…. It’s the sort of stuff you can’t make up, except perhaps Chabon did. There’s a jack o’lantern, a prison, a deck of tarot cards, a gambling rabbi, a roomful of spaceships, an Everglades python, and a rage-fueled chase across Germany, and that’s just skimming the surface. To say more would be to spoil the experience, and since I recommend the experience, I’ll stop there.

Warnings: Schizophrenia (portrayed sympathetically); mentions of the Holocaust, rape, and molestation; systemic anti-Semitism directed at the main characters; cancer; one instance of the g-slur.

9/10 ( )

Ignoring the whole marketing of this book as a novelised biography that tries to have the cake of Based on a True Story and eating it with extra flourishes of creamy embellishments too, this is a great yarn that is excellently told.

It's exactly like a story that's been rehearsed and practised and passed down the generations: well-refined, glibly passing over distracting details, introducing half-true garnishes that melt over time into something unrecognisable from the original.

Other than Kavalier & Clay, Chabon's fiction has not been my cup of tea. Everything is always laden with metaphors that my mind would splutter and drown in the thick treacle of descriptions before page 50.

But Moonglow captured my heart. There's a refreshing immediacy to the events. People can drink or wear clothes without either being compared to the deep unknown sea where the narrator would eventually be swallowed or the texture of sand as an exile in the desert (not actual examples). However there was still a troubling amount of bosomy descriptions for every woman.

There're three simultaneous time periods and yet they were never confusing thanks to Chabon's deft and steadying touch. I also enjoyed the gimmick of the characters being referred to as "my grandfather" or "my mother" instead of by name. Instead of keeping the reader at a remove, it added a stabilising element to the events, tying the characters to their future and the narrator. There are satisfying resolutions to events and gaspworthy twists that if you treat them as real would require a more sombre examination. I'd be glad to sit gather round a fireside for this serialised family tale.

Aside: I'm not sure how much connection this cover has to the content but I'd love for the matchheads to be like the spine of that edition of Fahrenheit451. ( )

3.5 stars. An enjoyable story, its chronology scattered across six or so decades, written in a straightforward, at times precise style. ( )

Quite good, written with deep meaning throughout. Unusual a fictional autobiography in which the author appears as himself, but it works. ( )

On his deathbed, a grandfather tells the story of his life to his grandson. It is true that the grandson's name is Michael and his father's family name is Chabon. However, this is a work of fiction, inspired by family stories.

The grandfather's life has been a full one. On his death bed he reveals his story in nonsequential flashbacks, which probably is the way such a narrative in this situation would be told. On the plus side, it allows the author to keep back some secrets that get revealed later. But to me it was not only confusing, but annoying when the story was disrupted.

Educated as an engineer, Michael's grandfather is very clever with mechanics and electronics. Sometimes this gets him into trouble and sometimes it gets him out of trouble. Werner Von Braun figures initially as a great influence in his life until his disillusionment in WWII. Still, he remains wrapped up in the space age mania of the 50s and 60s, gazing at the night sky and making models. Above all, the grandfather is loyal to his wife, despite her many problems. His ideal is to eventually live on the moon with his family.

This is a big ambitious book - a family saga - at times very funny and at times very poignant. ( )