Maybe it’s simply that this was read by the author or maybe its because I am at that age where I think a lot of my life and future life, but I did like this one a lot, maybe more than the sum of the book really allows for. Most of the essays of this collection or topics of essays ultimately lead to small revelations. In fact, there’s not a significant essay in this collection, but it hit home in a lot of ways. The […]
Throwing a kitten out a window was only a warning shot.
Halfway through Moonglow, I caught myself with my hand over my mouth, trying to keep my breath inside my body because the prose was so exceptionally beautiful. I had my worries before reading this book. I have only recently discovered Chabon, and have only otherwise read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was so stunning that it made me want to punch something. There is a lot of hype surrounding Moonglow, and even I only got it by accident from the library on a strict, one […]
Oy Gestalt
Chances are that, if you are reading this or any other website concerned with popular culture, you have little more than a passing familiarity with ultra-orthodox Judaism. Like most fundamentalist sects, they mostly keep to themselves. They rarely make the news except for when their behaviour becomes excessive somehow – excessively strict, like when some Rebbe or other gets into hot water for forbidding women Jewish and non-Jewish alike to walk across a public sidewalk or tries to ban children from attending school because their […]
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Michael Chabon is no stranger to strangeness. His novels are a cavalcade of oddballs and unusual circumstances, from the relocated Jews in Alaska of Yiddish Policeman’s Union to the comic-book artists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His latest opus may seem from a logline to be a more conventional offering, but in structure and detail it is just as unusual as any of his other novels. The novel purports itself to be a memoir of a writer named Michael Chabon learning his […]
Nicely Done Coming of Age Story
This was Michael Chabon’s first published novel but I had oddly never read this before. Chabon wrote this when he was about the same age as the protagonist and his group of summer friends. His youth shows but it is an asset in that it informs the characters in a very different way than if he’d written as a more mature person trying to create a younger feel. I actually backdoored into this particular book having first seen the movie version a couple years ago. […]
The Not So Amazing Adventures of Zelikman & Amram
I just left a comment on another CBR raving about Michael Chabon. And it’s true — I love the man’s writing. But this book was just really not very good. I started out liking it, because the language is enchanting. But I realized quickly that it was a lot of fancy words describing something I just could not enjoy. ““[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result – and have been since at least […]