Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I read fine)
Grown-up books! About apocalypse!
Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon. Wow. I first found Lethem by chance, though I don’t remember exactly how—either Amazon.com recommended one of his books or I was just binging on Jonathans (at the same time I first read As She Climbed Across the Table, my to-be-read shelf contained Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Franzen, and a Michael Cunningham novel in which the main character was named Jonathan), or a big-box bookstore put it on display… who remembers. Anyway, the point is, I’ve completely fallen in love with this author. And all the other Jonathans. There’s a good chance I’d even give Oprah books a chance if the author is a Jonathan. (Note: Franzen’s The Corrections was almost an Oprah book, until he expressed his mixed feelings and there was a big kerfuffle between Franzen and Oprah. So, there you go.)
Ahem. Amnesia Moon.
Chaos is living in an abandoned movie theater in post-apocalypse Wyoming, eating what canned goods he can find and washing it down with distilled alcohol. He’s afraid to sleep, for the dreams that haunt him: dreams of people he can’t remember, of places he’s never been. Dreams that aren’t his, but are still shaping his reality. He remembers virtually nothing from before; Hatfork, Wyoming, has been this way for five years and that’s all there is to it. Until, in a sudden burst of initiative, he sets out on the road in a stolen car packed with canned goods and water, with a 13-year-old girl covered head to toe in fine white hair for company.
On the road, Chaos and Melinda find other pockets of civilization: not everyone is living in projection booths. Some towns register citizens according to their luck profiles, some are completely enveloped by a dense green fog. As Chaos puts some distance between himself and Hatfork, his dreams become his own—dreams in which he’s a man named Moon, with a sketchy past and dimly-remembered friends—and he is a strong enough Dreamer to shape reality for himself.
The basic premise of the landscape—small, isolated towns, each subject to its own rules and culture, while a traveler passes through—reminds me a lot of Kino’s Journey, though Amnesia Moon has more of an overall plot. I could call it a typical road story, about physical travels and an emotional journey of self-discovery, but besides that just being a lame, cliché description of some really bad books, it just doesn’t do this title—or author—justice. This is only the second title of his that I’ve read (though I’ve two collections of his short stories on my to-be-read shelf), and I’ll admit that I liked As She Climbed Across the Table better, but I’d still not hesitate to recommend this one.
My current read: Orson Scott Card, Folk of the Fringe. It’s a book of short stories—more like novellas, really—of a post-apocalyptic world. I’m only about halfway through the first one (of five) now, so I can’t say much about it yet, but I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s nice to be reminded sometimes that Card used to be a good writer, even if his most recent efforts (specifically, the last in the Ender-companion Shadow series, Shadow of the Giant) have been too long and, frankly, dull. But that’s another post—I don’t want to infect this one with my bitter disappointment in what could have been a fantastic ending.
