Customer Reviews

Moon Palace

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Typical Auster: strong line writing, well-defined characters, coincidence-heavy plot, a nonexistent ending. The latter two separates Auster from the pool of countless other "literary" authors. Nobody else has Auster's uncanny ability to evoke the desperation of loneliness.

This is a strange novel, but if you've read Auster before, it's going to feel as familiar as that pillow you sleep under every night. There's this guy named M.S. Fogg, he's an orphan, and all sorts of crazy things happen to him, some by his doing, some by coincidence. The density of Auster's plot is staggering; the entire story of Effing, a character Fogg meets, could easily have been another book. That whole section almost reads like a Reader's Digest version of a bigger book, but I didn't mind at all. I don't mind efficiency when it's done right.

Don't expect much from the ending. It just is. If you expect a nice tidy package at the end, you're gonna be disappointed. Just take it for what it is.

This is my third Auster, already having read "In the Country of Last Things" and "The New York Trilogy." I love them all. I'm also a fan of Haruki Murakami, and I highly recommend you check out his books if you like Auster. They have striking similarities: both tend to utilize an unsure unwilling first person voices (faux noir, almost), work with weird plots, have coincidences aplenty, and have nonstandard endings.

In search of a good mystery I went to the Edgar Awards to find an author with whom I was unfamiliar. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster was unavailable, so I picked up Moon Palace instead.

I finished the book in one sitting. It seems to be more than a novel or stories strung together to tell a tale, but rather a grouping of real and beautiful pictures orchestrated with words. There is a sense of loss at its end, as if people you have known are now, once more beyond reach. It is one of those books that you wish you had only just begun, or that it was three times longer in length.

I'll go back to the book and read it again and I will read the rest of Auster's work.

This is one of Auster's strongest works. Moon Palace is difficult to summarize, and it would almost be easier to use a Venn diagram or a chronogram to describe the plot than to try to put it in words. Roughly speaking, the novel covers the curious life of M.S.Fogg, from his youth as an orphan to his strange days as a Columbia University graduate to his experience as caretaker of the eccentric Thomas Effing.

But the novel is actually a series of stories and antecedents, all woven together through a tangled web of improbable coincidences and interactions. Many of the sections are virtually self contained. The tale of Fogg's inward retreat as an undergraduate culminating in his descent into homelessness in itself could be a well formed short story or novella. Likewise Effing's bizarre tale of adventure in the wilderness of Utah is story in itself. The links between these sections are a haphazard series of coincidences and connections, some which are seemingly intentionally suspect.

Perhaps one of the most interesting stories-within-a-story literally *is* a story - Fogg's summary of a book written by Effing's long lost son, who in my opinion is one of the most interesting characters in the book.

Auster's eye for detail and appreciation for the absurd is in top form in Moon Palace. More than one passage made me laugh out loud. This isn't conventional humor, Auster amuses through his sheer audaciousness - he is an author that takes risks and the reader appreciates this.

The characters are an interesting mix. I found Effing to be fascinating, and his unpredictability largely mirrors the unpredictability of the novel itself, but he ultimately reads much like a caricature. The protagonist Fogg is complex and introspective, and it is a great success that Auster manages to allow the reader to connect with such a character.

You'll find all of the characteristic Auster trademarks in Moon Palace: elements of mystery that border on pulp, unlikely characters bound by a web of coincidences, a study of connectivity vs. isolation, and all wound in Auster's amazing ability to depict the emotions and energy of New York City. Highly recommended.

This book was problematic for me. I understand that Auster experiments with structure and narrative, me being a big fan of his previous work, but this novel had something missing. As other reviewers have written, describing the plot is difficult as there are so many twists and turns, but to put this alongside Murakami, Foster Wallace, and even Auster's past work is a mistake.

The novel starts off simply enough - we're introduced to M.S. Fogg, an orphan who goes to Columbia and finds himself learning about what it means to live in poverty. The book reminded me of Knut Hamsen's work, especially in the descriptions of hunger, but again, there was a disconnect that pervaded even this, the most solid part of the novel so that I could never feel fully integrated with the text. The novel digresses too often into different characters telling stories. If done well, hearing what took place to characters in a summary of sorts can be interesting, but in this instance, the stories within the novel were not interesting enough to warrant much attention. Even the emotional center of the novel, M.S. Fogg's relatonships with Effing, Kitty, and Barber are not strong enough to make you care what happens to Fogg. The most interesting character is Effing, but he is present for only one third of the novel.

What saves the book is Auster's ability to provide interesting details, ones that impressed me so much that I had to reread certain passages. It's the kind of book that someone who wants to write should read so that he or she can learn about how to provide a beautiful tapestry without making it seem forced or the most integral part of the story. My favorite is a description of Fogg furnishing his apartment and making furniture out of boxes of books his uncle left him.

Overall, a decent read and useful to writers. If you are looking for something to entertain you, look somewhere else.

I don't have much to really say about Auster, as I don't really like to overanalyze to anyone but myself, but he's one of my favorite authors, and this is actually one of my favorite books of his. Well, almost all of them are my favorite books of his.

Auster has a fabulous way of leaving you feel at unease, unsettled, and almost always absolutely alone. This is a book of books, from MS's initials, to his uncle's gift, to his relationships almost always defined in some way by words, so if you like... stories that leave you basically feeling weird, Paul Auster's your dude, and this is a great novel to start with.

Basically, all these reviews sound like intense intellectual reviews, and I just figured people should realize that these books aren't just for people that sound like they write reviews and analyze things for a reason. Anyone can enjoy Auster and the significance of his writing, understand his themes (the quest for identity is one of the most common themes in just about anything) and storylines, and I hope my review helps people from getting scared off! One of my favorite things about Auster is the concise manner in which he writes, which can feel sterile at times, but makes the read a lot less intimidating.

Paul Auster remains one of the best and most essential of America's living novelists. His novels are rich and dense, set against historical backgrounds that display his erudition. Unlike, say E. L. Doctorow (who I also like and admire), he does not play loose with the historical facts. He reserves the improbable for his own characters, as they move back and forth against this real backdrop, and I'm OK with that, and I can suspend the annoyance some reviewers felt, since Auster delights with the strange twists and turns in the plot.

In "Moon Palace," the principal character, "M.S." Fogg is my coeval, as well as the author's, so the time period resonates; Fogg attends Cubs baseball games when Ernie Banks played shortstop, and later was at Columbia U. during "the events" of the `60's. After graduating from Columbia, Fogg deliberately goes "down and out," and portions are no doubt inspired by Auster's life, based on the author's own autobiography, "Hand to Mouth." Fogg's recovery begins with his discovery by an old college friend, and his one love, a Chinese-American woman, Kitty Wu, and moves on through his employment, with Thomas Effing, a curmudgeonly old man on the edge of death, who is trying to "tidy up his affairs," as well as complete the historical record on his life before the ultimate appointment comes. This is when the plot becomes truly interesting, with Auster taking some wonderful twists, and even a few swoons.

The geographical backdrop is mostly NYC, as well as the "Four Corners" area of the American West, highlighting Bluff, Utah, of all places. There are also forays to Europe and the American Mid-West. Historically, Auster weaves Nikola Tesla (and his battles with Thomas Edison over the correct form of current - AC or DC), Thomas Moran (the painter who accompanied John Wesley Powell on the first exploratory trip of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon), and the moon landing of 1969. As a fitting reflection of the title, Auster inserts, and puns on various references to the moon throughout the book.

In terms of thoughts, and pyrotechnic displays of prose writing, there are ample ones to retain. Consider: "All children are love children," he said, "but only the best ones are ever called that." Or: "He was alone now, entirely separate from everyone; a bulbous, egg-shaped monad plodding through the shambles of his consciousness." And as a fitting summation of the book, as well as many a life: "That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together."

I do have a slight preference for his weirdly wonderful "New York Trilogy," but this book is also a solid 5-stars.

As a final thought on being a coeval, Auster writes: "It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future." Talk about resonating. When man first walked on the moon, I was sleeping every night in a bunker 13 km to the east of An Khe, in Vietnam's Central highlands, and the future was equally uncertain. Auster recovered from "down and out," and I survived an equally uncertain period.

I read this book during my honeymoon. I enjoyed it so much, that it made my wife complain because I didn't spend enough time with her. Trust me, I have read pretty much everything Auster has written, and I found this to be his most interesting and captivating work.

Paul Auster's "Moon Palace" is a dark, intellectual book about the loneliness and momentary as well as incurable basic identity-crisis (the angst) in the intellectually focus man. But it is also an amazing example of not only the "oh"-effect of chance but also of its intriguing beauty. This is as much Auster as Auster can be. It deals with his most common themes. But in this story it does so in a more subtle and delicate way than in "The New York Trilogy" and yet it can impossibly seem as empty as his small accounts of the impact of chance in "The Red Notebook" and "Why Write?" do to some. It is about something as basic as finding out where you come from and where you are going. And it tells us that we, ourselves, don't always seem to be the ones to decide.

_Moon Palace_ flickers through three generations of a family, with M.S. Fogg as the family avatar. Fogg is orphaned and uncled, and orphaned and sistered and fathered and fathering and finally orphaned again in a strange and gorgeous circle that still somehow manages to complete itself with satisfaction (if with sadness). Auster has written a book populated by beautiful ghosts. Highly recommended.

Paul Auster's Moon Palace is an interesting book, but it is difficult to grab hold of the main story, because the book consists of a large number of small stories. The narrative is a description of Marco Stanley Fogg's life connected with the stories of the various odd characters whom he meets. Throughout the novel the events happen by coincidence, but all these coincidences correspond, and many of them refer to the moon. This structure makes the book very confusing and sometimes these kaleidoscopic events get too much. E.g. the name of the maincharacter; M.S. Fogg. If the MS means manuscript, the result is a foggy manuscript, which is a good characterization of the novel.

M.S. Fogg compares himself to the moon, and an important quote is, "the sun is the past, the earth is the present and the moon is the future" as said by the scientist Nikola Tesla. What this means becomes clear in the last two pages, so hang on for a crazy ending!

We, as high school students, think that the novel is quite complicated, because of all these coincidences and referments. The novel includes many people (mostly artists and scientists) from this century, and it tells the reader much about the city of New York and the American way of living.

Moon Palace is also a story about loneliness and the lack of a father, and what hard times can do to a man.

We recommend the novel, but be prepared to be confused!