Michael Chabon often admits to using his life and family in his novels, and this is definitely no exception. The narrator, 'Mike', is a writer who is listening to his dying grandfather relate his life, something he never would do before. The stories, of his childhood, experience in World War II, his wife, his work, and all the dramatic incidents therein are told in what seems like no particular order, but ultimately the reader can see how one story relates to another. Chabon is a wonderful storyteller, and his characters are people I wish I could know. The narration is terrific. ( )

I liked 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay', but this was not my cup of tea. In general, the writing was good and the premise was interesting, but the characters were more sad than interesting. I did find the continual use of footnotes to be quite distracting. Not sure why some of the text was included as footnotes, it is not like it was not part of the main narrative.

The fact that this was a work of fiction somewhat raised the bar on what I expected from a story. This felt artificially disjointed and I had a hard time caring about any of the characters except the narrator. I reached a point where I felt like this was not what I wanted to be thinking about so I put it aside. ( )

Stop me, oh oh oh, stop me, stop me if you think that you've heard this one before - an old man on his deathbed tells the story of his life in time hopping fragments. His mad wife tormented by the Skinless Horse was more interesting to me, with the huge deception buried in her past - Oh, who said she lied, because she never, she never, who said she'd lied because she never? ( )

3.5, some parts beautiful, some contrived. There was a lot that reminded me of my own family story, and perhaps that is also why I feel reserved in my praise for the book. ( )

Chabon's novel is a fictional memoir of the narrator's maternal grandfather. The grandfather was a mechanically gifted but easily angered young man with a consuming interest in rocketry and space travel. He ends up in a form of secret military special forces looking for V2 assets for the US in Germany after WWII. He meets his future wife after the war. She is a war-damaged apparent holocaust survivor with a daughter by a previous marriage. The vicissitudes of this family related in a partially time shifted account is the structure of the novel. Chabon is a pleasure to read, and his Jewish mixture of comedy and tragedy is compelling. In an interview at the end of the text, Chabon admits that the memoir's grandfather has many of his own characteristics. He comments that, "My stories are all .... tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat." and "by being almost completely fiction, the book manages to get at essential truths about himself that memoir would not have been able to access." ( )