I read Moon Palace about four months ago. I really wanted to write something about it, even though its trace is no longer as fresh in my mind as it was then. This text is not a review. The book is wonderful, possibly the best Auster novel out of the three I’ve read (the other being The New York Trilogy and Timbuktu), and I’d recommend it heartily to anybody. This text isn’t an attempt at an exhaustive analysis either – I’m too far detached from my reading experience at this point. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but a degree of immediate entanglement with the text is essential to such a project. I’d like to think of it rather as a key or sorts; one that would allow me some day, when I revisit the story, to open more of its doors. I does contain some spoilers, and though I’ve tried not to reveal that much, it’s probably better to read it after the novel itself.My central intuition about Moon Palace (and by intuition I mean something composite, accumulated and thought-through, the result of many intuitive turns) is that it shouldn’t be interpreted at face value. In the first half of the book the narrator – one Marco Fogg – describes his unconditional surrender to the world: “Two years ago for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle. It wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself––you mustn’t think––but because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself.”If we the readers mimic Marco and surrender our trust completely to him, then we are tricked. The trick is beautiful and perhaps being tricked is part of that beauty, but it does not yield the penetration into reality that seems to be the subject of the novel. If we accept at face value the unlikely twists of fate that govern the story, essentially we choose to interpret Moon Palace as an escapist novel.Now don’t get me wrong, I love escapist novels and I particularly love the quasi-fantastical elements in Moon Palace. However, I don’t think that the book ultimately belongs to this tradition. There are plenty of clues to this end, strewn throughout and interconnected by a web of meaning. To unravel the web and open up the hidden spaces beneath the surface, one needs to find namely a proper key, and the safest, and probably wisest place to seek that key, is in the central image of the novel.This image is of course that of the moon, which crops up everywhere in the text: the title, the Moon Palace restaurant frequented by the characters, the references to Cyrano de Bergerac, the landing on the moon, the Moonlight painting, the emphasis on the moon’s place in the night sky at the very end. In addition to these apparent references, the image of the moon is used to construct much of the rest of the significant imagery. Lunar language is used to described Julian Barber, the recurrent motif of growth and diminishment (physical and social) harmonizes with the moon cycle and Fogg himself consciously recognizes the satellite as a force in his life: “I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom. (…) The moon would block the sun, and at that point I would vanish.”The alignment between the moon and the Sun signals a Platonic interpretation of the world that is powerfully reinforced by TomasMoonPalace3 Effing’s seclusion in the cave in Utah. These two celestial bodies are employed in many cultural practices to encode and mythologize knowledge about the nature of knowledge. Moon Palace certainly engages in this tradition. The omnipresent image of the moon is situated in multiple webs of meaning, not just sensory and metaphorical (with relation to the narrative), but also specifically cultural. The Moon Palace restaurant, whose role in the story is seemingly peripheral (but actually pivotal to its interpretation), is an explicit invocation of the tradition of Taoism. In his “Ways of Looking at the Moon Palace”, Edward Schafer writes of the moon palace as “the destination of an adept’s liberated spirit”. Funny enough, he also writes the following: “Yet another old scripture tells of a great Tao lord for whom the “Moon Basilica of Widespread Cold” is a vestry where he assumes a costume of feathers before accepting a holy text from the supreme lord of the universe.”The liberation of the spirit is undoubtedly what Fogg is after, and let us not forget the etymology of his surname, duly elaborated upon by himself. “Fogg” supposedly comes from “Vogel”, the German word for bird. Its English transformation, on the other hand, is reminiscent of “fog” – what needs to be pierced through to locate the source of light, or knowledge.Taoism, as well as other mythological architectures and indeed art to some extent, is a system of codes. The iterative recombination of those codes seeks to illuminate life and perhaps lead the student to liberation, to the moon palace. No wonder its presence in the novel is only circumstantial – through the Chinese restaurant – and even that seems somehow incidental; the moon finds its place at the very end, and Marco with it: “Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. I kept my eyes on it as it rose in the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness.”The novel itself is constructed as a code and displays that quality generously. Just consider once again the narrator’s name and all its transformations, its happenstance connection to Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (another story about the completion of cycles), the association with Marco Polo, who traveled to China, the suggestion that the initials MS (from Marco Stanley) might also stand for “manuscript”, i.e. for a life waiting to be written or perhaps decoded. Then there Marco’s stint as a translator, the whole business of changing identities and names (Effing’s), the invention of mythologies (Barber’s novel), the injection of intensely symbolic meaning into physical objects and acts.In the Tarot tradition, the moon is featured as the eighteenth trump, or Major Arcana card. Incidentally or not, Marco Fogg is eighteen years old when he arrives at New York to study in Columbia University. More importantly, the Moon is the card that is perhaps most closely allied to the interpretation of the imaginative powers of humans. In the Arthur Waite deck the face of the moon wears a deep frown (compare with the blissful child painted on the Sun card); beneath it we witness a landscape populated by two foreboding towers, a dog and wolf, a crayfish coming out of the water and a path leading into the distant horizon. Here is the interpretation of the card from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Waite: MoonTarot“The distinction between this card and some of the conventional types is that the moon is increasing on what is called the side of mercy, to the right of the observer. It has sixteen chief and sixteen secondary rays. The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit. The path between the towers is the issue into the unknown. The dog and wolf are the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit, when there is only reflected light to guide it. The last reference is a key to another form of symbolism. The intellectual light is a reflection and beyond it is the unknown mystery which it cannot show forth. It illuminates our animal nature, types of which are represented below—the dog, the wolf and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast. It strives to attain manifestation, symbolized by crawling from the abyss of water to the land, but as a rule it sinks back whence it came. The face of the mind directs a calm gaze upon the unrest below; the dew of thought falls; the message is: Peace, be still; and it may be that there shall come a calm upon the animal nature, while the abyss beneath shall cease from giving up a form.”Such an interpretation is clearly in the same Platonic vein that manifests itself time and again in the novel. Knowledge is reflected light, its source not directly accessible, ungraspable (in the same way the Tao/path is ineffable; it now strikes me as fitting that one of the characters trying to eff it should be named Effing); knowledge is inherently elliptic, riddled by gaps. The triad of reality-knowledge-imagination is at the heart of the moon image. Knowledge is derived from the true nature of things, from the Platonic world of ideas (the Sun in Tarot), but it is grasped as reflected light, i.e. as the Moon. Because of this, it is also distorted and incomplete to some extend.Herein lies the transmuting power of the imagination, which slides signifiers through metaphor and metonymy and encodes patterns of knowing, hiding but at the same time preserving knowledge. True knowledge might not be fully graspable in rational terms (just as Marco cannot fully explain the importance of having the baby with Kitty, he just knows it); it is nevertheless preserved as patterns that hide deep beneath the lives of ordinary people, in mythology and art. The mind can flirt with that hidden knowledge, unwittingly, and on some rare occasions it can be granted passage into the moon palace where the moon’s reflected light is strongest.In Taoism, Zen, mindfulness meditation, Yoga, Christian prayer, etc., a crucial prerequisite to achieving illumination is the stilling of the mind. Its restless nature is identified as a detriment early on in Moon Palace, via the character of uncle Victor: “Being the sort of person who always dreams of doing something else while occupied, he could not sit down to practice a piece without pausing to work out a chess problem in his head, could not play chess without thinking about the failures of the Chicago Clubs, could not go to the ballpark without considering some minor character in Shakespeare, and then, when he finally got home, could not sit down with his book for more than twenty minutes without feeling the urge to play his clarinet.”This restlessness often precludes the mind from encompassing the core meaning of things, if there ever is such a thing. Perhaps Effing’s demanding tasks for Marco, who has to describe in excruciating detail physical objects to his blind employer––especially the task of meticulously studying the Moonlight painting––can be seen as some kind of strange Western analogue to the meditative traditions of the East. Effing’s own self-imposed isolation in the Utah desert may be seen as such a form of meditation. I keep remembering a quote from Kafka that I read in Tom Robbins’s Still Life with Woodpecker: “You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”This idea that the world’s secrets are hidden in the everyday reality surrounding us is probably crucial to Moon Palace, which seems to suggest that imagination is the key to opening that door. Imagination as the faculty of extracting meaning from unlikely sources and refashioning it to illuminate yet again: “Uncle Victor found meanings where no one else would have found them, and then, very deftly, he turned them into a form of clandestine support.”But as argued above, imagination has an erratic relationship with truth, just as the moon and the Sun’s. It can obscure, as well asSunTarot elucidate. They enter into shifting compositions, occasionally into syzygies (I’ve always wanted to use the word) that yield positive of negative effects. Take Marco and Kitty’s relationship for instance: “I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.”This is the positive alignment which brings out the best out of the two. Later on, however, the moon, figuratively, comes to separate them. When Kitty finds out that she is pregnant from Fogg (the Moon card is often associated with impregnation in Tarot), her desire, framed in perfectly rational terms, is to have an abortion. Marco wants them to keep the baby, thinking of how his own mother decided to raise him without a father and let him be. He cannot express this urge rationally, rather he feels compelled to take this stance, by a force beyond his ken. These shifting interpersonal configurations are ubiquitous in the novel.So where does all this leave us? I’m the last person to disdain an interpretation that hinges on a theory of synchronicity, i.e. on a metaphysical explanation. But I feel that such an approach is not very useful here, it introduces a disunity between the elements of the story, robs it of a fuller potential. I prefer an alternative model which essentially replaces the impersonal metaphysical force with the very personal force of artistic imagination.I do have to reread the book to cull exhaustive evidence for this hypothesis, but in retrospection it is a no-brainer that Marco Fogg might easily be an unreliable narrator. A very unreliable one, to the extent that it’s possible that none of his narrative ever really “happened” (in terms of the pretend realities constructed by fiction, of course). There are plenty of points along the story when Marco can have – deliberately or due to a mental illness – veered significantly from the truthful representation of reality. He does, after all, subject himself to a life of poverty and seclusion, fills his head with the 1492 books left to him by his departed uncle Victor (his favorite person in the whole world), lives in a cave in Central Park, almost dies. Madness is a recurrent topic, with more than one excellent specimen on display, most notably the possibly fictitious appearance of the elderly Nicola Tesla in Effing’s account.Or maybe Fogg devised the whole story as a sort of therapeutic enterprise that let him redefine his life and his relation to the world. He refers many times throughout the novel to his present life, supposedly well after the events in the book, but never reveals anything about it; perhaps that is a future state that anticipates that transformative effects of imagination and storytelling. Or perhaps Marco Fogg’s story is a meta-autobiographical account of Auster’s own life – the similarities between the fatherless writer and his characters have been noted by many.Whatever the truth, whatever the extent of “fabrication” (which is necessarily of a second order, as it is taking place within a fictional reality), an explanation that incorporates Marco Fogg as an active (co-)creator rather than as a passive observer is much more sensible and in accord with what is suggested by the novel. Below I give a number of quotes that demonstrate how emphatically the book insists on talking about imagination: “Causality was no longer the hidden demiurge that ruled the universe: down was up, the last was the first, the end was the beginning. Heraclitus had been resurrected from his dung heap, and what he had to show us was the simplest of truths: reality was a yo-yo, change was the only constant.” * “The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a ways of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.” * “This was imagination in its purest form: the act of bringing nonexistent things to life, of persuading others to accept a world that was not really there.” * “His facts might not always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.” * “It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it’s all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head.” * “A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way round. There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we’re not. You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.”One might argue that in the end Fogg has found his vocation – to be a writer. He ends up with a number of stories that are produced within the framing one (Kitty’s, Effing’s, Barber’s), possibly by himself. He discovers (or invents) his lost identity, and through a string of symbolic and not-so-symbolic deaths gives it up to fashion a new one, with the moon in the right place in the sky. Much of Marco’s experience as an aide to Effing actually resembles the painful transformation of an ordinary observer into a writer: “The problem was less in my delivery than in my general approach. I was piling too many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in fact obfuscating it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions.”MoonPalace1One of the covers of Moon Palace depicts a bird laden with books, flying beneath a full moon, possibly trying to reach it. The knowledge in those books, I believe, at the same time pulls the bird down to the earth and constitutes its only chance of succeeding. To reach the moon palace and walk the path (the Tao) to its end, Marco must arrive at a new form of knowledge. He must simultaneously lose all pretense of knowing (by giving up uncle Victor’s books and, metaphorically and literally, his life) and incorporate it deeper into his fate (through imagination). Not being able to tell what part of his story is true and what false sums up a major point of the novel: true knowledge is not merely a reflection of factual reality, it is alchemically derived from the pale, reflected fire of the moon. The moon itself is never static, it is always in flux, just as people go through cyclical phases in their lives. Imagination can guide the path into the palace. At least in the canon of Paul Auster.Originally published on my blog.
Voy a hacer un ejercicio que casi siempre evito: escribir un review de uno de mis libros favoritos. “El Palacio de la Luna” puede ser, para alguna gente, un libro iniciático. Leerlo a los veinte años puede ser una experiencia parecida a leer “El Guardián en el Centeno” a los quince. Lamentablemente yo leí a Salinger muy tarde; a Auster lo leí exactamente a los 20. He leído al menos 4 veces “El Palacio de la Luna” desde entonces (aunque la última vez fue hace ya un buen tiempo), y en todo ese tiempo es probablemente él único libro que nunca ha salido de la lista de mis 3 favoritos. En la historia.Y sin embargo. Es un libro imperfecto, eso salta a la vista. Algunas cosas no son defendibles: Kittie-wu tiene el doble defecto de ser una clásica Manic Pixie Girl y al mismo tiempo ser horrorosamente orientalista - la infame frase de “Here comes the Dragon Lady” ha sido caricaturizada - con razón- en más de una crítica. No solo es racista y anti-feminista al mismo tiempo, sino que algo aún peor: simplemente está muy mal escrito. Las acciones del personaje principal son absurdas - lo que en sí mismo no es un problema - pero en muchas ocasiones Auster pareciera querer insinuar que hay una trascendencia enorme e inexplicada detrás de todo - cuando claramente no la hay. Estoy más que seguro, apostaría mi mano derecha a que en su proceso creativo Auster a veces pega palabras o imágenes que le parecen sugerentes, sin tener ninguna idea de que es exactamente lo que quiere sugerir. Por eso a los lectores menos ingenuos les irrita Auster: les parece presuntuoso, les parece un mistificador. Y probablemente es cierto. Y creo que ahí está la raíz del hecho de que Auster por un buen tiempo haya sido inmensamente popular en Europa y en America Latina y casi un desconocido en EE.UU. Auster defiende además su utilización de las coincidencias absurdas dentro de la trama como otro elemento estético, incluso argumentando elementos biográficos (cuenta en su biografía algunas coincidencias muy raras que le han pasado en la vida, pero eso es otro tema). Puede ser cierto que sea parte de su propuesta estética, pero eso no quita que es una propuesta que facilita las cosas. Utiliza las coincidencias como un Deux-ex-Machina: cuando la historia pareciera que no va a ninguna parte, he ahí otra coincidencia. Demasiado fácil. Recientemente un detractor me llamó la atención sobre un elemento crítico más importante: la cosmovisión que presenta Auster, su visión postmodernista, ejemplificada principalmente en este personaje principal que es principalmente un espectador al que le pasan cosas. Todo el mundo pareciera girar alrededor de M.S. Fogg. Para escribir algo así probablemente la dosis de individualismo tiene que ser alta, bordeando el solipsismo. No lo sé.Otros elementos son más argumentables: las larguísimas historias-dentro-de-la-historia se han vuelto una característica propia de Auster; a muchos les irritan estos desvíos de la trama principal. Yo creo que son uno de los mayores aportes de Auster: doblar los géneros y no respetar las convenciones de la novela si el libro lo pide (además, en general las historias son muy buenas). Y sin embargo. Sigo pensando que es uno de mis libros favoritos, no tengo ninguna duda de eso. Siempre me ha gustado la crítica literaria a posteriori: tu sabes adentro si te gusta un libro o no. El proceso crítico puede después ayudarte a iluminar algunas áreas: porqué te gusta este libro, porque encuentras belleza en él, porque te apasiona leer libros así. Cuando trató de describir que es lo que realmente me gustó, puedo llegar fácilmente a varios elementos: Auster es un escritor eminentemente visual, trabaja con imágenes. Lo comentaba en mi review de La Musica del Azar: al final del libro, años después incluso, uno todavía se acuerda de la imagen de Pozzi caminando sobre un muro construído en un prado, con los restos de un castillo destruido. En “El Palacio de la Luna” hay cientos de imagenes así. M.S. Fogg viviendo solo en Central Park, o en un apartamento amueblado solo con cajas selladas llenas de libros, o caminando por el desierto. Es un libro absolutamente épico, y me gusta que alguien se atreva con algo así. Es claramente un intento de Gran Novela Americana. Algunos odian eso, pero yo creo que es lo que necesitamos. Necesitamos libros como “2666”, como “Pastoral Americana”, como “Little, big”. Todos distintos y ambiciosos a su manera. Alguien por ahí debe estar revolcándose en su tumba de que haya puesto estos nombres juntos. Pero nadie puede negar que EPdlL es un libro ambicioso, al menos en intención. Auster además es un maestro absoluto en lograr poetizar objetos comunes sacándolos de contexto (como hace con las cajas de cartón llenas de libros en EPdlL, o con las guías telefónicas en Oracle Night). Y es un narrador increíblemente dotado; esa es lejos su mayor virtud. Y en eso se parece a Salinger.Pero al final del día, cuando un libro realmente te mueve no es por el juego de sopesar lo malo y lo bueno y ver que es lo que ganó al final. Para mi el punto es este: si hay algo que no puede imitarse o falsearse, es la pasión. Hay un sentimiento extraño, que he tenido con pocos libros: a todos nos ha pasado leer algo muy rápido, sin poder soltarlo. Es una buena sensación. Pero pocas veces me ha pasado leer sintiendo que el autor estaba escribiendo rápido lo que yo en esos momentos leía, sin poder parar. Me pasó con Salinger. Y me pasó con Auster. 5 estrellas.
What do You think about Moon Palace (1990)?
Sự dễ chịu trong hành động đọc đôi khi nằm ở chỗ mọi thứ dường như được đẩy tới giới hạn của nó. Những sự kiện lỡ dở trong cuộc sống sớm nhường chỗ cho những quyết định. Vài chuyện lấp lửng cũng trở nên chóng vánh và dứt khoát. Giống như nhân vật Marco Fogg trong Moon Palace (Paul Auster – dịch giả: Cao Việt Dũng, Nhã Nam và NXB Hội Nhà Văn ấn hành) nhanh chóng “biến cuộc đời mình thành một tác phẩm nghệ thuật, bằng cách tự hiến mình cho cái nghịch lý tối hảo” (tr.41). Nghĩa là cậu chàng dứt khoát “không hề động tay vào việc gì” (tr.40), lay lắt mỗi ngày bằng hai quả trứng và ngồi chờ “thưởng thức kết cục” (tr.41) của chính mình.Paul Auster viết Moon Palace đan xen từ ba câu chuyện có kết cấu rõ ràng. Không khó để ta nắm bắt các tình tiết vốn đã hấp dẫn và cuốn hút. Đó là câu chuyện về cậu chàng Marco Fogg kỳ quái thực hành “thứ chủ nghĩa hư vô được nâng lên tầm một định đề mỹ học” (tr.41), bằng cách cố gắng sống mà không phải kiếm tiền. Đó là cuộc đời của tay họa sĩ già Thomas Effing chìm nổi trong những sự kiện hư thực lẫn lộn, với sa mạc, hang đá, những tên cướp và nỗi cô độc. Hay là thân hình phì nộn, cái đầu hói của Solomon Barber với những ám ảnh về người cha đã khuất khắc họa trong câu chuyện mang tên Máu của Kepler.Những mảnh ghép trôi nổi, dòng sự kiện diễn ra giữa ba nhân vật chính trên được giải đáp bằng sự ngẫu nhiên của cuộc đời họ. Marco đến với Effing sau khi suýt đầu hàng thần chết trong mưa lạnh giữa công viên trung tâm New York. Còn Effing gặp Solomon sau cái chết của Thomas, cũng chính là cha của Solomon. Cuộc đời con người có được bao nhiêu lần ngẫu nhiên như thế. Paul Auster dường như thích những mối dây liên kết. Và không có gì hợp lý bằng liên kết các nhân vật, chi tiết, cuộc đời và mọi thứ giữa họ lại với nhau bằng những tình cờ. Như chính Marco trong đợt khám tuyển lính đã tuyên bố “Cuộc đời của chúng ta được qui định bởi vô vàn sự tình cờ” (tr. 131)Moon Palace là dung hòa của vô số chi tiết tuyệt đối đặc biệt. Nhưng những con nhân vật của Moon Palace đều phát triển theo chiều hướng chung: cô độc và khát khao tự thân tồn tại. Vì cô độc giữa thế giới nên buộc phải quay lưng lại mọi thứ. Và vì chòng chành trong những mối dây liên kết lỏng lẻo, họ buộc phải khẳng định cuộc sống của mình theo một cách khác. Với Marco là việc ngồi một chỗ bán dần từng cuốn sách của ông bác Victor và sống lần hồi, với Effing là chuyến đi từ bỏ thế giới, là hành động thay tên đổi họ sau những tháng ngày ẩn giật. Còn đối với Solomon là tập cách sống không cần nhìn mặt mọi thứ trên đời dù ở ông chẳng có chút nào gọi là kiêu hãnh lẫn tự phụ. Tất cả cuộc sống đối với họ, kể cả những nhân vật phụ như bác Victor, Kitti, Emily – mẹ của Marco có vẻ chỉ là một trò may rủi bất tận, kéo dài không dứt từ thế hệ này sang thế hệ khác. Họ dù già hay trẻ, dù khoảng cách thế hệ có bao nhiêu, vẫn muốn “buông mình vào sự hỗn độn của vũ trụ” (tr. 132) để có thể tìm thấy “một sự hài hòa bí mật nào đó” (tr 132)Moon Palace còn là câu chuyện của những hoang mang, đánh đổi và trả giá. Bên trong Moon Palace, người ta có quyền sống theo những cách thật đặc biệt. Song le, không có nghĩa là họ có thể chối bỏ mọi hậu quả bên ngoài lẫn bên trong tâm hồn mình. Marco đánh đổi cho “thứ chủ nghĩa hư vô” đó của mình bằng cách chịu đói khát, lạnh lẽo trong công viên như một kẻ vô gia cư. Effing trả giá bằng một cuộc sống tật nguyền, bằng cách phân phát hết số tiền mà ông cho rằng mình đã lấy từ những người khác. Và từ thế hệ này sang thế hệ khác, họ lần lượt lượt mắc những sai lầm giống nhau. Effing từ bỏ đứa con để bắt đầu một cuộc sống khác. Solomon vô tình không biết mình còn một người con. Đến Marco, cố gắng để giữ lại cái thai trong bụng Kitti, cuối cùng đã mất đi tình yêu của mình.Trong Điệu valse giã từ của Milan Kundera, nhân vật Jakub luôn có bên mình một viên thuốc độc màu xanh. Với nó, ông có thể kết thúc cuộc sống bất kỳ lúc nào. Và bằng cách đó cắt đứt đi tất cả các mối dây tồn tại của mình với thế giới. Cũng với cách tư duy như thế, một ý muốn tự thân khiến Effing quyết định ngày giờ chết của mình. Song ông không dùng thuốc độc, ông cố gắng bị ốm, cố gắng cho đến ngày đã định và cố gắng chết một cách tự nhiên. Đó không phải thứ cố gắng của “chủ nghĩa hư vô”. Effing vẫn muốn nối mối dây cuối cùng với tự nhiên. Và thông qua đó có lẽ ông muốn khẳng định lần cuối ý chí sống, khát khao hòa nhập vào một điều gì đó to lớn và có sức ràng buộc hơn là một đời người.Paul Auster dường như đi đến rất gần với văn hóa phương Đông với những đan xen chằng chịt từ thế hệ này sang thế hệ khác, với quan niệm của ông về cuộc đời, về dấn thân và những trả giá. Paul Auster nhìn mỗi sự kiện như một thắt nút mở ra nhiều sự kiện khác với nhiều điều bất ngờ không đoán định được. Tác phẩm của ông - Moon Palace giống như một sự mỉa mai thứ chủ nghĩa cá nhân tuyệt đối muốn phủ nhận những liên hệ giữa người với người. Chúng ta có thể cô đơn giữa cuộc đời, song bản chất cuộc đời luôn có những ràng buộc cố hữu không lay chuyển được. Có lẽ bởi vì mặt trăng mà mỗi ngày chúng ta ngắm nhìn vẫn tồn tại. Mặt trăng như trong một cuốn sách khác Red Notebook, Paul Auster đã nói “là tất cả trong một, nó là một chuẩn mực. Đó là mặt trăng như một huyền thoại…, trí tưởng tượng, tình yêu và sự điên rồ”
—Quang Khuê
3.90/5I mean... it's a very good novel! I loved its structures, like in One Thousand and One Nights, there's the main story (Marco's life struggle) and from there the narrator tells the story of a character, with another story inside, etc. Also, there was something in the plot, maybe in Marco's tendency to "disconnect" from the world, to disappear, that reminded me a bit of The New York Trilogy. I really liked it. And it is very well-written. And the characters! I really enjoyed the parts of the novel with Thomas Effing, he's such an original and awesome character! But it is more than that, all the characters are very-well defined and I feel that somewhat, their ultimate fate is closely related to their personality. Oh, and the ever-presence of the moon throughout the book, that was interesting.Then, why only 3 stars? (well, it should be a 7.8/10) Well, because I didn't feel anything. While reading it, I was enjoying the book, I was delighted by Auster's prose but... it just didn't appeal to me, to any kind of feelings besides pure literary bliss.
—Teresa
Hmmm. My first Paul Auster work was The New York Trilogy which I read a few months ago. I was impressed by the beauty of the writing and the intricacy of the stories but felt an emotional disconnection due to them not really going any where. In the end I just found them frustrating.So, Moon Palace which is not a collection of short stories but a full length novel in its own right was an oppurtunity to see what Paul Auster could do in this format. As it turned out though, it was mainly a case of different name, same story.Moon Palace opens in the same way as all of his New York Trilogy stories; a seemingly 'normal' man, Mr Fogg, who begins to disassociate himself from society and starts both an internal and external disintegration. In the short stories that wouldn't change but in this longer novel there is an intervention and the protagonist gets his life back on track in a different environment and the past becomes a closed book as he starts again. He comes into contact with Effing Thomas (oh the wit) who was quirky, unusual, bizarre, and, yes, very very similar to the quirky, unusual and bizarre characters in The New York Trilogy. Things continue along in this second phase of the novel for a while before everything breaks down and once again Mr Fogg leaves it all behind and embarks on his next adventure. In fact you could almost call it the third short story in the novel. Which then follows a very similar trajectory. Again.Paul Auster can you write any other type of books?
—Nicola
