Book Review: Moon Palace by Paul Auster

American author Paul Auster (born New Jersey, 1947) invites all Earth-dwellers to this fascinating literary construction named Moon Palace; food for thought and entertainment guaranteed. Since its first publication by Faber and Faber in 1989, Auster’s novel has never ceased to delight readers from all around the world. Moon Palace is the creation of a talented writer, in which both the initiation and the adventure novel are given a post-modern turn of the screw. Welcome to the place where everything collides and converges at the same time: Romanticism and Modernism, the American dream and the Vietnam War, New York and the Far West. This is the palace where you can search for your self under a moon that means whatever you want it to mean.

Marco Stanley Fogg, the first person narrator of this story, is a sort of Jules Vernean-and-Western hero of the late 1960s; a Columbia graduate with a promising future who hits rock bottom after losing his uncle to an unexpected death. The forces of chance strike Marco twice in his life: when he is eleven, his mother is run over by a bus, and, having no father, he is raised by his uncle, who dies when Marco is in his early twenties. After this last loss, M.S Fogg gives himself up to the forces of fortune, going from riches to rags. He almost starves to death in Central Park until random events (and a Chinese girl named Kitti Wu) rescue him from homelessness, fatherlessness and solitude. His life takes an unexpected turning when he starts working for Thomas Effing, a blind old man in a wheelchair. He becomes Fogg’s mentor, as it were, and initiates him into the Romantic ideas underlying America’s mythical quest for the West. Effing seems to be the last link with a pre-war and pre-civilized time. He captivates Fogg with his stories about Tesla, the Gresham Brothers and the Indians. Effing, an annoying-yet-endearing man who dies twice, teaches Fogg to open his eyes to the particulars of the world. Will this crippled old man also become Fogg’s motivation to travel West? What type of hidden treasure will he find on the Pacific coast?

Moon Palace mirrors everyman’s quest for identity, the pursuit of a dream, and the suffering which the journey to one’s center entails. The challenge the protagonist is confronted with bears resemblance to the feat performed by the first men who landed in the Moon. No matter how Romantic this novel might seem, it is still a contemporary novel with post-Modern features, where Moon Palace can be either a symbol of idealistic pursuits or the name of a Chinese Restaurant. Post-Modernism is also present in the plot’s denouement, where nothing really seems to happen, yet there is an epiphanic moment when all the forces of life converge in one inspiring moonlight. If you are looking for hope, read this book.