Moonglow

Michael Chabon visited his dying grandpa in 1989, when his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, had just been published. He had gone to Oakland, California, to see his mother. Strong painkillers loosening his tongue and the approaching death stirring his memory, Chabon's grandpa imparted memories and tales the younger man had never heard before, revealing fragments of a past long lost and forgotten. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon's newest work of legerdemain, Moonglow, is based on that surreal week of discoveries.Moonglow is the story of a guy the narrator only ever refers to as "my grandfather" making his dying confession. It is a story about madness, war, adventure, sex, marriage, and desire, as well as existential doubt and model rocketry. It also explores the devilish underpinnings of American technological achievement in the middle of the 20th century and, most importantly, the destructive and creative effects of lying and keeping secrets. It depicts the challenging but intense love that existed between the narrator's grandpa and his mysterious grandmother, who was damaged by her upbringing in a France that was ravaged by war. It is also a masterwork of speculative autobiography, where Chabon creates and divulges a hidden past from his own thoughts.The novel explores an entire era through the eyes of a single person and condenses a lifetime into a single week, taking readers from the Jewish slums of pre-war South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a retirement community in Florida to the utopian prison of Wallkill, New York, and from the height of the space programme to the end of the "American Century." Moonglow is one of Chabon's most imaginative and poignant works to date. It is a work of fictitious nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a book that passes for a memoir, and a deception that conveys the truth.