Paul Auster's Moon Palace

Paul Benjamin Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He is a novelist, poet, screenwriter, and graduate in English literature. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family of Polish descent. His parents were Queenie and Samuel Auster. He was introduced to literature at an early age thanks to the library of an uncle, who was a translator.

He began writing at the age of 12, beginning his career as an author, penning poetry and essays for various magazines. His works have been characterized by a disconcerting blend of realism and fantasy.

He is also an American writer, screenwriter, and film director. Thanks to his talent, his books have been translated into more than 40 languages. His work is notable for its inclusion of absurdism, existentialism, detective fiction, and the search for meaning and personal identity.

Among his works stand out The invention of loneliness (1982); The New York Trilogy (1987); Moon, S Palace (1989); Leviathan (1992); Timbuktu (1999); The Book of Illusions (2002); The night of the oracle (2003); brooklyn follies (2005) and Winter diary (2012). He has written the scripts for the movies Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1995).

Moon, S Palace

Marco Stanley Fogg is on the cusp of adulthood when the astronauts set foot on the moon. He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was eleven. Marco Stanley was raised by his uncle Victor, an eccentric who earned his living playing the clarinet in shady orchestras. Then, when his uncle dies, Marco Stanley Fogg only has enough money to survive a few more months.

When his father dies, he manages to live for a while by selling the books he left him. He begins a journey in search of his identity and origins that will take him from Manhattan to the remote American West.

Auster is a cult writer among other writers

Little by little, but without pause, indigence absorbs him, loneliness and a kind of calm madness, where his life is reduced to exploring the joyous hells of absolute deprivation.

He is already living like an animal in a cave in Central Park, in a semi-delirium caused by hunger, when the beautiful Kitty Wu rescues him. Fogg is saved and decides, for the first time in his life, to find a job.

Fate and a complex network of signifiers around the moon, the lunar and light, lead him to work as a reader and companion for Thomas Effing, an old paralyzed painter.

And writing the biography of Effing, who wants to continue the legacy of Solomon Barber, the son he never knew, Marco Stanley Fogg will discover, on a journey that takes him from the Moon Palace, a Chinese restaurant in New York, landscapes of the American West, the mysteries of his own origin, the name and identity of his father.

A little more

That summer when man first set foot on the moon. At the time, I was a very young boy, but I didn't believe there was a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to go as far as possible, and then see what happened when I got there.

The way things turned out, I almost didn't make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to nothing; I lost my apartment; I ended up living on the streets.

I lived in that apartment with more than a thousand books. My mother was buried next to her parents in Westlawn Cemetery, and I went to live with Uncle Victor on the North Side of Chicago.

From what I could gather, times were tough for the Moonmen, and after a long run of bad luck (broken contracts, punctures, a drunk who had broken the saxophonist's nose), the group had finally disbanded. You can also find out more about Books by Eduardo Galeano.