Amnesia Moon (edition 2005)

I enjoyed this book if only because it was so odd. Although the story appears through the character of Chaos, apparently, as I neared story's end I began to wonder: Has all of this been someone's fantastic dream? And if so, whose dream was it? As for the so-called apocalyptic event that runs throughout and is often referenced, in the end was it, too, just a part of this vague dream? All remains unanswered, which makes for such a fascinating read. ( )

Jonathon Lethem’s second novel, Amnesia Moon, centres around a man named Chaos living in the post-apocalyptic town of Hatfork, Wyoming. The bombs have fallen, society has crumbled, the sky is tinted with radioactivity and the mutated townsfolk are reliant on a tyrant named Kellogg for their food. Less than 30 pages into the book, after making him admit that he can’t remember how long ago the bombs fell or what he was doing when they did, Kellogg convinces Chaos that the truth of their world is “a little more complicated,” and Chaos sets out on a post-apocalyptic roadtrip to uncover the truth.

Lethem’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, felt like a neat concept for a short story that had been stretched out into a novel. Amnesia Moon feels more like a collection of short stories patched together to make an extremely surreal novel, and I was unsurprised to learn, after finishing it, that this is precisely the case. Chaos travels across an America devastated by wildly different apocalyptic events – everybody agrees something bad has happened, but it appears to be different everywhere he goes. The only unifying element is that each location is dominated by a “dreamer,” somebody forcing their version of reality upon others. The different locales are all drawn from various unpublished short stories Lethem had written.

This is a lazy way to write a novel, but I found Amnesia Moon readable enough, and it has a particularly good ending which suggests that one of the more disturbing realities is in fact the truth. It deals quite a lot with dreams and memories and amnesia, which I normally find tedious, but Lethem is a skillful enough writer that Amnesia Moon is rarely tiresome. I didn’t see much point to it, as a novel, but he’s a good writer and I’ll keep reading him. I look forward to when I get to the point in his career when he’s actually writing novels rather than short stories in disguise. ( )

Finished this read in three days. Narration was good, story has potential but I was left wondering WTF. From start to finish I didn't know what was reality and what was dreamality. There are actually three good story lines in the book, but all put together wasn't a good idea in my opinion. I liked it, I didn't like it, I don't know, was I dreaming when I read it? ( )

Set in a post apocalyptic USA, nothing is quite as it seems. Chaos, aka Everett, the main character cannot remember exactly who he is let alone what caused the break from the world before to the world now, and he cannot find satisfactory answers in Hatfork Wyoming, the dilapidated town populated with mutants where he has a position of some sort of oversight, so he sets of to find answers, taking with him a young mutant girl.

He may not find all the answers he's looking for, but along the way he does find love and hope, although it may not exactly match the dreams he's been having, the dreams that started his doubting.

In Amnesia Moon dreams and reality become confused in a sort of modern day Alice in Wonderland; funny, thought provoking and highly imaginative. ( )

Chaos, also known as Moon, lives in a post-apocalyptic America, or perhaps some other reality. Reality, however, is shaped by dreamers, and Chaos is a latent dreamer. He sets out on a quest to find a better way to live seeking not only truth but also, as it turns out, community and family.

One way to read the book is as an analogy about postmodern society. In this view, reality is created by us, that is by social consensus. This certainly includes dysfunctional aspects. In the book, the dysfunctional aspects dominate, e.g. a broken down post-apocalyptic setting, a green fog, and a TV celebrity centric society. This is particularly frustrating, since better options exist, such as represented by the futuristic cars.

A thought-provoking, entertaining read. ( )