Amnesia Moon | 
|  | | | Title: | Amnesia Moon | | Author: | Jonathan Lethem | | Publisher: | Harvest Books | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 08 August, 2005 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 015603154X / 9780156031547 | | List Price: | $14.00 | | You Save: | $2.10 | | Amazon Price: | $11.90 | |
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| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny second novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.
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.
Amazon.com Review
A funny post-apocalyptic road noir tale of Chaos, who lives in an abandoned projection booth at the Multiplex in Hatfork, Wyoming, and his journey to find the truth at the heart of his own American nightmare.
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Customer Reviews:
• Perchance To .... 01 April, 2008
This book will convince you that insomnia isn't all that bad a thing.
Which is worse: a megalomaniac or someone pulling the strings who doesn't even know he's doing it? Lethem will have you scratching your head continuously as you try to figure out the meaning of this (pick a genre so long as "strange" is part of the description) book.
It seems the consensus of reviewers is that there is a weak ending. Add my vote to that tally. This is a weird book which is fine; but coupling it with a non-existent finish does a disservice to the reader.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1GCZ07XRJX858
• A Must-read For Philip K. Dick Fans 12 December, 2006
Sometimes I find myself reading the old Philip K. Dick books and thinking: Where did Dick get these ideas? Were they transmitted to him from an alien satellite brain (or Vast Active Living Intelligent System)? Who's picking up those transmissions now?
Here's the answer. Except for the 1990s references, this book could easily have been written by Dick himself. (There is a brief reference to Dick's DR. BLOODMONEY at a San Francisco cocktail party). This book bespeaks an enormous freedom of imagination: "something" has happened, nobody knows what (shades of Delany's DHALGREN), but afterwards some are "dreamers" able to construct oneiric "Fictitious Subjective Realities," and others are trapped in these FSRs. The narrator Chaos (or Everett) and his sidekick, the furry little girl Melinda, travel through a variety of these dreams, from the postapocalyptic wasteland of Hatfork, Wyoming, to the zombified media-slave suburbia of Vacaville, to the fog-shrouded Oedipal struggles of San Francisco. to the wars with the alien hives in LA.
This book is truly an explosion of creative promise, drawing out those threads first revealed in Lethem's short stories in CRANK! and elsewhere. I'm eager to pick up more old Lethem SF, before he caved to the exigencies of verbosity for mainstream acceptance.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3NEN5NMJ78CWF
• Lathe Of Leaven 01 April, 2007
In 1971, Ursula Le Guin wrote the short novel, _Lathe of Heaven_ in which George Orr's "effective dreaming" tranforms reality in just the arational way you'd expect from the subconscious. Le Guin's novel ends with "the break," an event that changes reality in contradictory and chaotic ways. In both content and form, Lethem's novel feels like a sequel to that novel. Chaos, Everett, Moon--whatever name you go by--lives in a world permanently and madly altered by effective dreaming. The difference is that the talent was unique in _Lathe of Heaven_. In _Amnesia Moon_ dreaming transforms reality locally, producing overlapping and confusing realities. In this case, the aftermath proves less interesting than an inciting incident deep in the background of the Lethem's novel. Though ably written, _Amnesia Moon_ is ultimately less satisfying than Le Guin's work, a less exciting and less interesting continuation. By itself, the novel is compelling enough, but juxtaposed with Le Guin, it seems mere fluff.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A136HTK5JT0KM9
• Not *nearly* As Good As His Later Work . . . 12 January, 2007
I've read most of Lethem's novels and all of them are different, so you never know what to expect. And most of them are pretty good, especially _Motherless Brooklyn_ and _The Fortress of Solitude_. Lethem is obviously getting better and better as he goes along -- which may explain some of my dissatisfaction with this one, which was his second effort. It's a post-holocaust story, though it never becomes clear what the holocaust actually consisted of; various characters have differing memories of what happened. Chaos -- whose real name may, or may not, be Everett -- is living in an abandoned multiplex in a small desert town, dividing his time between drinking and dreaming contagious dreams. Circumstances lead him to leave, taking with him a thirteen-year fur-covered girl named Melinda. Their subsequent travels lead them to a settlement high in the mountains that is blinded by some sort of green fog, then to Vacaville, California, where the survivors change houses twice a week and maintain order and curb antisocial behavior by writing each other tickets. They end up in San Francisco, where Chaos/Everett apparently came from originally. Through all of it, his dreams impinge on the sleep of those around him. And at that point, a little over halfway through, I have to confess I lost what little interest I had been able to maintain and withdrew my bookmark. I hate not finishing a book. More than that, I resent it. Especially when the author, like Lethem, has proved his bona fides.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2GBJQ9THOYDAJ
• Let Your Mind Play With The Ideas 21 September, 2007
This is a road story where the main character leaves his town in Wyoming to find his identity and answers to key questions that churn over & over in his mind. It all sounds straight ahead, simple, but there's been an apocalyptic event some indeterminate time ago that has changed the face of the USA; the town he's leaving is full of mutants; he leaves with one of them, a girl covered in fur; his dreams suggest that he's not who he thinks he is and others can see his dreams when they sleep nearby. The story hooked me early.
On their travels Chaos and the girl, Melinda, encounter widely different communities - aside from the mutant town, there's one encased in a green fog, another where government officials star in their own TV show and also police the community...all of which seem to be conjured by those in the community that have the ability to broadcast their dreams to the masses around them. Is Letham commenting on how people can be brainwashed and controlled by those with power? Some of the communities are cult-like, with inhabitants doing as they are told by their demi-god.
No-one seems clear on the nature of the "disaster" that led to this post-apocalyptic world or at what point in time it occurred. There is no shared reality on this point beyond acceptance that a disaster of some sort happened. This makes the book intriguing, especially in a time where we all accept that we're waging a "war on terror". Even if we can't define the scope of what that encompasses, we accept that it needs to be done. It is one shared reality in my world.
This book made me think about how we become communities, how we arrive at shared values, how we are governed/controlled, the power of "group-think" & how much we are prepared to accept at face-value without questioning. The story may seem slight, more novella than novel, but it's thought-provoking if you let your mind play with the ideas.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AT2L79EBBH6PJ
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