129. Moonglow
Rating: ☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Nancy Sissom
Author: Michael Chabon
Genre: Historical Fiction, Fiction
430 pages, published November 22, 2016
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
In 1989, after the publication of his first novel, writer Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California to visit his terminally ill grandfather. 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. That week of revelations is the foundation for the semi-autobiographical novel Moonglow which explores the lasting impact of keeping of secrets and telling lies.
Quotes
Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.”
“I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.”
“She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”
“My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane.”
“The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all it’s analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”
“The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.”
“They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.”
“He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own.”
“When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah. At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.”
“Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment.”
“One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.”
“She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack.”
“I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.”
My Take
While Moonglow is receiving a lot of critical acclaim (including a National Book Critics Circle Award Nomination for Fiction), I found it to be an uneven book. Although certain sections and characters were interesting and held my attention, other parts of the book felt like a slog. This was disappointing since I had really enjoyed reading Chabon’s 2001 book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. In contrast, by the time I finished Moonglow, I was glad to be done so that I could move onto a new book.
