It thrummed with the passage of a car overhead.” that Grandpa nearly dynamites: “The bridge seemed to hold itself in tension, straining at its tethers as Orland Buck and my grandfather slid beneath its haunches. About his great-grandmother: “In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines.”Īnd later, his description of a bridge near Washington D.C.

Mental illness and secrets whisper around her, the character of Grandma-a plausible response to having, as a Jew, shared France with someone like Hitler.Ĭhabon’s prose is a spirited, even-gaited horse. The next, he steps into a synagogue it’s now 1952 and he sees her for the first time, the woman he will love for life. On one page, Grandpa nears 75 and is dying. Which intersects with the Mittelbau-Dora German concentration camp and the sky-high rate of fatality for those who built the V-2 rockets.Ĭhabon masterfully braids generations, eras, stories, dramas. Former Nazi-now-American scientist Wehner von Braun intersects with Operation Paperclip, the CIA effort to bring over 1,500 Nazis scientists and engineers to America, and to NASA.

What adds to the compelling narrative is its intersection with significant broader history. All the facts in his book are true except where they aren’t-that is, where the facts part with “memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” It’s a convention.”Ĭhabon even satirizes all author’s notes everywhere.

In a November LA Times interview, Chabon confesses: “It’s a commonplace thing for novelists to do, and we’ve been doing it for centuries now, to create a fake nonfictional document. These stories arrive thanks to death’s nearness, which loosens the tongue of this largely unknown grandfather, says the narrator, a fictionalized “Michael Chabon.” Fact and fiction crisscross, it seems, to form the genre-bending chessboard of this speculative autobiography or “faux-memoir.” Oppositional defiance may spur him into page-turning situations: fighting in WWII, hunting German rocketeer Wehner von Braun, throttling his boss and, in his mid-70s, going after an escaped python alone. The protagonist, Chabon’s grandfather-a fictionalized grandfather-strides large and complex and strangely sympathetic, a man who moves with riveting power, yet a man whose dreams don’t ever come true.

This image captures well the new book by Pulitzer prize-winner Michael Chabon. Speculative Autobiography?īuy Now: Amazon ] Kindle ]Ī shadowy horse lopes in a long pasture at night, sliding in and out of the full moon’s bright glow.

Michael chabon grandfather