| Title | : | Amnesia Moon |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 015603154X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780156031547 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 1995 |
It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.
Amnesia Moon Reviews
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CRITIQUE:
The Fat Man in (at the End of) Post-History
Once again, Jonathan Lethem uses genre to explore and test his talent for world-building, narrative construction and dialogue.
This time, it's a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Some sort of disaster has occurred. A break? Perhaps, a bomb? An alien invasion? Nobody seems to know.
"There's no one explanation, Everett. People remember some kind of disaster. But there's no agreement on what it was..."
"Don't worry about it. It's like a jump cut in a movie. Everyone is missing something."
"I've been getting these dreams ever since the break..."
"Living under the regime of an eccentric dreamer may be better than suffering through the disjointed, amnesiac period that followed the disaster."
"As in previous eras, the leaders are not necessarily those who are wisest or strongest. They are the ones with a certain fixity of vision. And with the most comforting explanation for the disaster."
Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine
The narrative commences in the desert of Wyoming in the small town of Hatfork, and heads west on a road trip, through another green world, via conformist government-run Vacaville, until it finally reaches the weird scenes of San Francisco (including the best party scene in fiction since William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon):
"The map is not the territory, man."
"San Francisco...[was]...a city of erasures."
"Basically a lot of the old connections between things fell away, which gave people a chance to make up new ones. But the new ones don't always stick."
"It's very local. I'm sure you've noticed how local things can get nowadays."
"You know, the weirdness came out, that's all. It's not like it wasn't always there..."
"The dreams seemed designed, either by the computer or by some part of his sleeping self, to nudge him towards speculations about his life before...they confused him...He suspected that some of it was just dreams, not actual memories. Anyway, he'd learned by now to distrust dreams and memories both. Both could be inauthentic."
"What did his attachment to Cale and Gwen mean if he could barely remember them? Who was he, if all he knew of himself was the shreds of memory that clung to these people?"
"In America everybody's already wandering around lost. Even before the changes."
"Keep me from forgetting. Don't let me get lost like that again."
"A gestalt urge for coherence, after the rupture."
The Paper Bag of Solipsism
It's ironic that everywhere the environment is so precisely portrayed, yet somehow the novel suggests that all is solipsism.
It's unclear whether everything is occurring in the mind of the apparent protagonist, Chaos/ Everett/Moon, or perhaps in the mind of a psychically domineering fat man, an almost archetypal messianic dreamer called Kellogg, who projects dreams that appear to control everybody else.
"And there's the dreamstuff, you know. The Man got into everybody's head, so I guess everybody got a look at how severely neurotic The Man actually was..."
"Sane and real only go so far these days."
Alternatively, as in any novel, it's possible that everything is just happening in the mind of the author, and/or, by extension or extrapolation, is it's just happening in the mind of the reader.
Conversely, are readers the only thing that can liberate writers from their solipsism (or vice versa)?
"For my living I climb into and then punch my way out of the paper bag of my solipsism on a daily basis."
- Jonathan Lethem
Somebody to Love
Chaos/Everett wonders whether we are more than our memories of other people. Perhaps, we are our interactions with others, an other, the other?
Chaos/Everett finds himself in his relationships with Gwen (San Francisco), Edie (Vacaville), and Dawn (San Francisco):
"I came back to [San Francisco] to find her [Gwen], and I found her. And what I found there, in her arms, whatever the surrounding conditions, was real. Is real."
"I thought I was coming back to something, if I came back here. To a self."
"Who you are isn't a matter of memories, anyway...It's what you do. Your choices. Who you make yourself into."
"You're Everett, in love with Gwen. Everett with Gwen. Just like I'm Gwen with Everett, Gwen for Everett. Do you love me, Everett?"
Rest Your Head on a Surrealistic Pillow
At times, reading the novel seems to be like wandering around inside a Salvador Dali painting.
The novel could be fruitfully paired with one of my favourite works of fiction, Angela Carter's
"The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman".
Salvador Dalí, Mae West's face which may be used as a Surrealist apartment, 1934-35. © Salvador Dali
SOUNDTRACK:
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Mad Moon: Furry Road
I've read a bunch of Lethem (and a lot of Philip K Dick), so for me this novel was just a mediocre, road trip, post-apocalpytic PKD remake*. IT had obvious direct PKD references and influences:
Eye in the Sky &
Dr. Bloodmoney &
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. PKD is the only one who should really try to be PKD**.
Later Lethem (
Motherless Brooklyn &
The Fortress of Solitude) &
Chronic City) is more confident and sings with his own voice. This one apes and apes well at times, but leaves a lot of soul out of the narrative. Still, I can't demolish 'Amnesia Moon' too hard despite the sometimes wispy narrative and repetitive set pieces because I see the latent talent in Lethem and just want more of HIS voice, more of HIS taint and HIS talent.
* And to be fair to Lethem, there are plenty of mediocre PKD novels out there too.
** Although I do appreciate how Lethem's love for PKD being is felt in his editing of
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick and
The Philip K. Dick Collection. -
Surreal, dreamy little banger evoking the early works of Ballard.
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Throughout the years Jonathan Lethem has made no secret of the high regard that he holds for Philip K. Dick. The MacArthur grant winner has edited and written the introduction for the Library of America anthologies of Dick's work and written several great articles about the mad prophet of science fiction's final descent into paranoia and madness. For all of this though, it wasn't until I picked up one of Lethem's first published novels, Amnesia Moon, that I was able to see just how much the hallucinatory style of Dick had influenced the writer.
Living in an abandoned movie theater in Wyoming, drinking poorly distilled grain alcohol and forcing himself to stay awake for days at a time to stop himself from dreaming, Chaos can't really be said to be enjoying his apocalypse. At some time in the past something happened that shattered the world. Nuclear war, alien invasion, a blinding mist- theories abound. Too bad nobody can quite remember their names, let alone their past, so we're not quite sure. What we are sure about is that in the wake of this disaster a group of people arose who were able to make their dreams into reality, influencing those around them to believe, look like and act according to this inflicted reality. Tired of dreaming other people's dreams, Chaos flees Wyoming with a fur-covered girl in search of the answers to his past and the source of the all-pervading amnesia. The duo take a roadtrip through the blasted ruins of America, alternately being effected by and effecting the various dreamers that they come across.
With its ever-shifting cascade of conflicting realities, its obsession with the frangible nature of identity and its bleak view of the future, this book could easily have been published as a recently discovered manuscript of Dick's. The swirl of events passes through so many different scenes, each town an isolated universe of disorder and insanity, that I was reminded of the complete head trip of Dick's Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, never sure what to believe or where the truth may lie. In recent years Lethem has shifted his sights from the science fiction of his early books to his other lifelong obsession (music) but he still stands as an accomplished master of the genre. If all you've read of Lethem is his post-millennial output then you owe it to yourself to try out his first books. -
I seem to have a knack for picking up the odd ones lately. This particular one is weird in my favorite kind of wacky weird way.
I've been trying to think of how to explain this one without giving away the why of things, which is really the coolest part. I'm going to give it a shot.
Chaos is living in Hatfork, Wyoming where the world is ruled by a man named Kellogg's dreams. After yet another unpleasant encounter, Chaos takes to the road with his furry companion, who is actually a 13 year old girl. In Hatfork they believe that there was a nuclear disaster and it's caused genetic mutations. As Chaos travels west he encounters a series of what are sort of like pocket dystopias. Each one thinks something different happened to end the world, and each one is very unique. I'm hard pressed to say which one was the most bizarre. There's The Green, Vacaville, San Francisco, and L.A. that I can remember.
I think it's a rare author that can pull you into a bizarre situation and have you completely riveted. I didn't realize how hooked I was until a phone call interrupted the conversation between a clock and a bonsai and I couldn't get off the phone fast enough. "The bonsai was in the middle of saying something!!!"
This was really interesting and I got drawn in more and more as the story progressed. -
Since I just re-read 'Motherless Brooklyn' I thought I'd get around to reading the sci-fi book of Lethem's that's been sitting on my shelf. Unfortunately, I didn't like it nearly so much.
'Amnesia Moon' is really a seriously wanna-be-Philip-K.-Dick book. If you really like Dick and his trippy perspectives on things, you might love this book. I thought it had some interesting moments - but, as a whole, it didn't work for me.
It's a post-apocalyptic scenario. There's definitely been some kind of disaster, but no one seems to remember exactly what happened. No one really seems to remember much. Everett Moon, aka Chaos, etc, leaves the derelict town he believes he's been in for the last five years, along with a mutant teen, and embarks on a journey... it seems that everything has become very "localized" - different areas are completely different realities, possibly controlled by those individuals whose dreams have gained the power to influence reality. Moon seems to be searching for something - but it's hard to identify what you want when you can't even remember your old loves or friends...
Like I said, there were some interesting scenes - the "green" town is memorable, and the idea of accessing and communicating with people by injecting drugs was kinda interesting (if, again, Dick-ian). However, the book has no conclusion whatsoever, let alone an explanation. I felt like the author couldn't think of a satisfying way to explain what had happened - so he just decided not to bother with an ending at all. Disappointing. -
Video review
For fans of Ubik-style Dick, quirky sci-fi in the same vein as Aldiss' Hothouse, and generally speaking of mutant novels that can shift shape in the span of two pages. Also, the least post-apocalyptic post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read. -
Loved it! What a zany dream-world! Where do dreams and reality collide? How can one tell in which state one is in? What if one's dreams collide with another's dreams? Can one stop dreaming to live reality? What's reality?
This book is surreal, which makes it incredibly interesting and entertaining. Chaos moves from one dream state to another, trying to figure things out. The world has changed. Where did he come from? How can he find out? Who can he believe? What's real? As he struggles to make sense of things the dream-like world changes and changes.
I really enjoyed the wacky surrealism of this story. I'm glad I picked this book up. It's the first of Jonathan Lethem's books I've read but I'll be reading more. -
I really do not know what to make of this one -- it's bizarre and disjointed, with no clear message or even plot. But . . .
There are parts here that seem allegorical (sometimes heavy handedly so) -- broad statements on American life. Intentional? Or am I just desperate to find some kind of meaning? I really couldn't say.
So it's a challenging, frustrating story. I wish I could say that I liked it, but I just can't. It's unusual for me to find a book that is just too weird, but this one is definitely in that category.
Probably for die hard Lethem fans only. -
Il "Chaos" è il protagonista assoluto di questo romanzo di Lethem.
Un protagonista che tramite i sogni è in grado di modificare i mondi e le vite di chi lo circonda (oltre che della sua...) senza averne però pieno controllo.
Un romanzo che ti tiene incollato alle sue pagine, anche se oggettivamente non sono sicuro di aver capito perfettamente tutto ....
Come scritto da altri prende parecchio spunto da Dick, specialmente da Ubik. -
Be wary of this book. Be aware that for about two thirds of it it will make next to no sense. Be aware that the final chapter, the one in which answers are given, when the plot is made tidy, when we get to breath deep and finally "get" what's going on--that chapter is missing.
Chaos lives in a future America after the bombs have dropped, living among mutants in an abandoned theater, afraid to sleep because then he will be forced to dream the dreams of the petty tyrant who rules this land. When he escapes, he finds another world, not one of bombs, but of a green mist that covers everything, rendering the population blind, the dreams of that town controlled by some other petty tyrant. There are dreams of a barely affected San Fancisco, McDonald's workers who never leave the building, a Nevada overrun by aliens with humans fighting from fortresses in the sky that never land, of a whole range.
Chaos must try to understand these dreams, he must try to remember his past (no one can), he must try to understand this world. He won't, but he must try. This is a novel about trying to understand the world, our society and our wishes. It is sometimes rough, but the language is beautiful, the imagery is stark and the questions, lacking any simple answer, are probing and many.
Sometimes I wonder how Lethem even got this (and his followup, As She Climbs Across the Table, about a woman who falls in love with a scientific nothing called Lack) published, but I'm sure as hell glad he did. -
This makes Dostoyevski's The Double look like child's play. And the notion of FSR--Finite Subjective Reality makes Inception's Dream Seeding like something commonplace, accessible.
The Chaos/Everett interplay is the most entertaining cabal of schizophrenia I've ever encountered. Jonathan Lethem, without a doubt is a genius, Amnesia Moon is both comic and tragic, funny and heartwarming. And sometimes grotesque too. But so much fun to read. Or listen to, I listened to to the audio book narrated by Scott Sowers. And, yes, a lot of the books enjoyment can be attributed to the narrative prowess of Scott. But this book can hold its own in text form too.
I first discovered Jonathan Lethem through his short story King of Sentences that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008. And I've been hooked ever since.
Can't wait to start MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. -
Jonathan Lethem did it to me again! I am not a great fan of science fiction but I enjoyed "Amnesia Moon" just as I enjoyed "Motherless Brooklyn" and yet do not read many murder mysteries. Here is one gem from the book, "Vance being real doesn't mean the aliens are, said Fault. It's just another dream, Everett. What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort." This is a story about a lost, single man named Chaos who discovers the meaning and importance of family, they are the people who take care of you every day and reward you with love.
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As typical of most "literary Science Fiction" it is only interested in using the SF/Fantasy genre for a hip, ironic setting, however, it seems that Lethem lacks the talent to pull it off effectively. I forced myself to finish this book with a vague interest to find out "what happens", only to have the payoff of a lame, unsatisfying ending.
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First of all, I love being dropped into the middle of a story and having to figure out what's going on--seriously. Secondly, Lethem's got an easy-to-read style that just flows well and gets the pages turning right away. So, knowing all that, why only three stars?
Unfortunately, my interest started waning toward the end. I'm not sure if the book actually became less interesting, or if it was a matter of lost momentum for me: I had a busy weekend where I was hardly able to get any reading in, and when I came back to the book on Monday, I just didn't have as much motivation to keep going.
Also, there's the issue with the ending. As people have said all over Goodreads, it's ambiguous, and that's actually another one of the things I often like in books: trying to figure out just what happened in the final pages. It makes me think, and that's a good thing. And even if I can't come up with an answer to all the questions on my own, at least I can poke around the Internet and read some theories, which is always fun.
But alas, between losing interest in the second half of the book, fighting to stay awake while I read those last few chapters (boy, was I tired), and the intentional ambiguity of Lethem's story, I wasn't left with a very satisfying taste in my mouth.
One thing that I greatly regret (after reading some of the other Goodreads reviews) is not having read some more Philip K. Dick before tackling Amnesia Moon. Apparently there are lots of references to PKD stories in here, but all of them went right over my head. Sad.
Then again, maybe this is a good thing--it might get me to seek out some more Dick, which is something I should have been doing anyway. Hurrah! -
Easily my favorite of Lethem's Dick-influenced "Concept Sci-Fi" beginnings, Amnesia Moon is part post-apocalyptic pulp, part episodic road novel, part Wizard of Oz reworking, and part surrealist philosophizing. It's pretty heavy on the familiar or cliche plot devices -- village of mutants, amnesiac protagonist, authoritarian local government, alien conspiracies, the subjective nature of the world -- but thrown together with fresh vision and panache into a truly unique work. Takes some truly unexpected turns and renders some really gripping scenes that resemble little before or since.
Writing this review finally, a year and a half after reading this one, I'm bumping it up a star and seriously wanting to read it again. -
An ode to Philip K. Dick, this is a funny and slick little novel about a man named Chaos, calls himself Everett, a woman named Melinda who travels with him to search for who survived an apocalyptical war across the United States, and finally a villain named Kellogg who is the keeper of sustenance for those who survived, or maybe the apocalypse didn’t happen at all? Realities and fantasies begin to blur, hence Chaos’ amnesia may be that he is called Moon? This is one trippy little book by Lethem’s that really shows a love of Philip K Dick as part of a prolific career.
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I'm glad I read
Chronic City and
The Fortress of Solitude before this, because I wouldn't have tried Lethem again had this been my first experience. -
Interesting take on the post-Apocalypse/mind-bending reality genre, where reality becomes literally subjective. Sometimes it gets a little too obtuse, but there’s some really good moments and ideas. Letham’s got a weird imagination, as seen in another book of his I read awhile back, Gun, With Occasional Music. Possibly not for everyone, but if you like PK Dick, you might try this.
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3.5
This book is so weird, creative, and feverish that it should be four stars, but the ending bumped it down to 3.5 stars. -
Jonathan Lethem is my hero.
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I... think? there's some interesting metaphors buried in here, but it's mostly incoherent. If you like David Lynch at his worst, then you might dig this.
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Aw man! I can really see why some people hate this novel or find it too confusing and unstructured, but this is my jam. Amnesia moon's final chapters had me reading at 3am with 4 hours to go until I got up for work.
It's fun, confusing, absurdly trippy, and now, a personal favourite of mine. -
I've noticed Lethem's similarities to Philip K. Dick before, but it's extremely apparent here, almost to the point where this could be a lost novel by PKD. This is a trippy story that bends reality to extreme lengths, and one is never sure exactly what is real and what is a dream (that makes it sound like Inception, which maybe isn't a terrible comparison). I can't say that it completely makes sense (although it's not necessarily supposed to; more on that at the end), but I really enjoyed every word.
It starts out very Fallout-esque, with a cool post-apocalyptic vibe and characters with names like Chaos and Edge. At some point in recent history, there was a "break" in reality - possibly a nuclear war, or a plague, or an alien invasion. No one seems to know exactly what happened or when. As our hero Chaos (or is it Moon, or Everett?) moves west, he encounters different dream-states, each stranger than the last. Different parts of the country seem to be under the influence of "dreamers" who can influence reality around them.
The ending, like the rest of the book, is ambiguous. There seems to be a hint of an answer, but in a book about the subjective nature of reality, an absolute explanation would contradict everything that came before. If I had to guess at what the "break" really was, I think the alien invasion angle fits the best. Chaos sees the helicopter-planes twice in different locations, which might mean that they are real and not the creation of a dreamer. The alien "hive-mind" is analogous to the dreamers, and it would also explain why everyone seems to have amnesia. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter. The question of the "break" becomes a metaphysical one that doesn't need to be answered, and each person lives within their own bubble of reality. I don't think it's a coincidence that our "hero" is named Chaos - he moves from reality to reality disrupting the order of the dreamers, with the results sometimes positive and sometimes negative.
Highly recommend to fans of intelligent, reality-bending sci-fi and/or Philip K. Dick. -
Lethem’s previous Sci-Fi novel “Gun with Occasional Music” is one of my all-time favorites, so when I saw this new science fiction novel by Lethem I snatched it up. After reading it, I can’t say I have a new, all-time favorite, but the novel is well-written, with strange and interesting characters and settings.
Like “Gun with Occasional Music,” the new novel explores themes of remembering and forgetting. In the dystopian future Lethem creates for “Amnesia Moon,” certain people, none of whom are particularly nice or deserving, can, through a kind of telepathy, vanquish the past, create new realities, and force other people to live in them. The results range from sad to horrific, but, the reader soon begins to realize, aren’t all that different from the way things work now.
Lethem writes beautifully (“dang I wish I could write like that” beautifully.) A line like this: “He reached out and poked Chaos with the suck end of the cigar, leaving a smear of tobacco-brown drool on his tee shirt.” can make a whole scene work—and Lethem has scenes full of them.
If it were me, I might have left some of that beautiful stuff on the cutting room floor. This novel saunters, so if you’re looking for a thrill-ride—well, “Amnesia Moon” is more of a train trip from Chernobyl to Fukushima than a rocket ship to the moon (it’s a train that turns into a submarine and then back into a train, okay?) If you do read it and like it, you will probably also like “Gun with Occasional Music,” which moves at a faster clip.
Reminds me of: “The Dreaming Child,” one of my favorite short stories, by Isak Dinesen -
In a line: not as inventive as it thinks it is, but definitively strange.
Or: Cloud-Atlas lite.
Or: Nightmare Invisible Cities.
Certainly the general concept of Amnesia Moon is solid; I'm all for multi-hued-dynamic-post-apocalyptic-landscapes, but at many points the novel begins to feel just a little too smugly pleased with its own surrealism. While reading I was driven by a great sense of unease. Not unease like "The Road," where I was perpetually worried for the main-characters, but unease where I constantly wondered what was going on and why I should care.
Many details and smaller ideas are great, but the over-arching science/fantasy feels a little weak. It's not quite "all a dream," but it's pretty close, and one of the later revelations, "FSR," is something only a a precocious fifth grader (who hasn't yet read a "Brief History of Time") would find to be original/worthwhile. There are many mini-homages to Philip K. Dick, and in many respects I wish Lethem had worked the best ideas into short stories and left the rest, like a hitchhiker who's look you don't quite trust, by the side of the road.
I'm giving this two stars, if I could give it another half, I might; I'd be willing to read another book by Lethem, but it'll probably be from the library, rather than bought. -
As the cover says, futurist road trip noir written in obvious homage to Lethem's hero, Philip K Dick. An American world completely transformed by a disaster which could be, but somehow isn't quite, a nuclear holocaust. Chaos, the hero, breaks out of his refuge in the mutant town of Hatfork to find out what has happened, and discovers in his travels that reality now has the quality of dreams dreamt by mysterious, dominant dreamers. Finding out here they are is the moody, discontended task of a rebel-wtihout-a-cause, rather the redeemer character often at the heart of mainstream SF novels.
There are elements of Martian Time-Slip here, and Now Wait for Last Year, and at one point we even discover that we are in a world crafted by PKD himself, though Lethem has laid substantial claim to make it work the way he wants it to. I think it's too obviously a story motivated by the desire to get ideas of his chest which have come about through decades of immersion in a Dickian universe to think that Lethem is going to produce a string of great SF novels. I expert his true ouvre belongs more naturally in the world of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude to ever go in this direction again (other than his a short story perhaps), but that makes this even more of a little gem of book. Highly recommended. -
Lethem's "Amnesia Moon" hooked me from the first chapter, successfully creating an overwhelming need to rearrange my day so I could read the damn thing to the end immediately.
I found each scene in the story to be anecdotes for different aspects of American culture, making the book a wonderful piece for sharing and debating after being read. (I will not include my thoughts on these here, for fear that it would color the imaginations of future readers in a thick green).
Melinda, despite her relatively small part in the narrative, was an incredible character. I found her to be well derived and described.
While I certainly found a logic to the end of the story, I did not find it appeasing. I could understand how the physicality of Chaos/Everette and his little band represents a new reality for everyone. While a beauty exists in not resolving the illogic world when it can never make sense to the main protagonist of the narrative, it also felt a little as if Lethem had painted himself into a corner (or reached a required word limit for an editor) and decided to not work it out. This small critique would not stop me from highly recommending this work.
