As with any family history, the deeper you probe and the more patience you have to piece vignettes together, the more enthralling his story becomes. Still, sticking with Grandpa’s Dilaudid-induced recollections is essential. The tangential asides and footnotes don’t help matters either. Because Chabon barrels through by piling on anecdotes from different periods of Grandpa’s life without laying sufficient groundwork - Grandpa’s arrest in 1957 for nearly strangling his boss with a telephone wire after getting fired the time he and a mate planted live explosives on federal property during an Army Corps of Engineers training session in 1941 his obsessive escapade tracking the V-2 rocket and Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun across Germany post-World War II - it can be difficult to maintain a firm handle on the narrative.
Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours.”Īt first, the effect is disorienting and, dare I say, frustrating. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish,” he says to Mike. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did with all that time, is waste it. “You try to take advantage of the time you have.
Hopped up on hydromorphone, the normally tight-lipped man - unnamed throughout the book - compulsively spills the beans about his past to his grandson Mike, the novel’s narrator, before he dies. Mirroring the real Michael Chabon’s experience, the book unfolds as a retelling of his grandfather’s deathbed confessions.
0 kommentar(er)
