{"id":6533,"date":"2017-04-17T06:38:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-17T10:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6533"},"modified":"2017-04-17T06:38:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T10:38:12","slug":"moonglow-a-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6533","title":{"rendered":"*****Moonglow: A Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tarot

photo: Meg Lessard, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Michael Chabon \u2013 It\u2019s interesting Chabon labels Moonglow<\/em> a novel right on the cover, because it\u2019s also has one foot in the memoir camp. The character Michael appears, but the book is only tangentially about him, somewhat about his mother, and mostly about her parents. And what a fascinating set of grandparents he has! The story is based in truth\u2014bolstered by footnotes as an occasional reality check\u2014and leavened with humor. Yet many details and conversations must have sprung from Chabon\u2019s impeccable imagination and his obvious love for two characters called only \u201cmy grandfather\u201d and \u201cmy grandmother\u201d throughout.<\/p>\n

His grandmother, a beautiful and elegant Frenchwoman, survived World War II and the camps. With little more than a set of fortune-telling cards that would be springboards for stories she told her grandson, she emigrated to Baltimore. There the would-be Dolly Levis of the synagogue hoped to match her up with their young rabbi. The night they were to meet at a temple social event, the rabbi dragged his unwilling brother along, and a match was made, just not the one the women expected.<\/p>\n

The Frenchwoman had a daughter already (Chabon\u2019s mother), but his grandfather accepted her a hundred percent, as is. And \u201cas is\u201d was not easy. She suffered from severe bouts of depression that resulted in several hospitalizations, and the delusion that a skinless horse lay in wait for her. Nevertheless, they were a good pair. Keeping bad news away from her, as the grandfather insisted upon, \u201csuited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main story is the grandfather\u2019s, and the premise of the book is that he was close-mouthed throughout life until the week before he died, when he told Chabon everything. \u201cKeeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from,\u201d Chabon says.<\/p>\n

Chabon skips gleefully back and forth across time and space in recounting his grandfather\u2019s World War II experience (where he participated in Operation Paperclip, an effort to snatch up the German rocket experts before the Russians could get them), his lifelong fascination with rocketry and model-building (NASA obtained some of his precisely detailed models), his prison experience, businesses built and lost, and a late-life romance in a Florida retirement village where a giant python was stealing the pets.<\/p>\n

In short, the grandfather reveals and Chabon skillfully assembles and polishes a treasure chest of experiences, Dickensian in their variety, one to be explored with delight and wonder.<\/p>\n

For very good reason, Moonglow<\/em> (affiliate link below) was selected by numerous publications as a \u201cbest book\u201d of 2016.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Michael Chabon \u2013 It\u2019s interesting Chabon labels Moonglow a novel right on the cover, because it\u2019s also has one foot in the memoir camp. The character Michael appears, but the book is only tangentially about him, somewhat about his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****Moonglow: A Novel - a glittering treasure chest of a story","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,118,126],"tags":[964,963,416,446],"class_list":["post-6533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-memoir","category-reading-2","tag-michael-chabon","tag-moonglow","tag-real-life","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Hn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6535,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6533\/revisions\/6535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}