Moonglow

Sep 11

Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Reviewed by Linda
📕📕📕📕

FYI - Chabon opens Moonglow with this:
"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. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon."

As you can tell from a disclaimer like that, this is not your usual memoir! This is fictional non-fiction at its very finest. Moonglow is the death-bed confession of Michael Chabon's maternal grandfather - an extraordinary man who lived an out of the ordinary life in pre-war Philadelphia, WW2 and beyond. Terminally ill, supplied with painkillers and knocking on death's door, you will not know what to expect next! How many grandfathers do you know that tried to kill their boss, blew up a bridge, spent time in New York's Wallkill prison, designed model rockets and married a woman with mental difficulties? None I suspect. To all the science geeks out there, Michael's grandfather's work at Chabon Scientific Co., had me geeking out majorly... I've heard so much about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, so I'm moving onto that one next!

MoonglowMichael ChabonMemoirFiction

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

Moonglow

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

The Sellout