![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a made-up memoir, the story of a man – a writer called Michael Chabon – who sits at his grandfather’s bedside and listens to a welter of memories, their tumbling, freeform nature aided by tongue-loosening painkillers. Which is it, then, memoir or novel? As it turns out, of course, it’s both, and neither. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.” ![]() But it’s not that simple: an author’s note declares it a memoir, with the added qualification that facts have been stuck to “except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Unsurprisingly, Chabon being primarily a novelist, it features in the fiction category and, as described on its cover, Moonglow is indeed a novel. But perhaps nowhere is this interest more strongly interrogated than in his new book Moonglow (4th Estate), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in the US. ![]()
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