Moon Palace

E primul roman al lui Auster, pe care îl citesc. M-a dat gata. Nu știu ce va urma, dar sper să îmi placă la fel de mult.
"Palatul lunii" e despre prietenia dintre oameni, că sunt rude sau nu, că stiu că sunt rude sau nu, însă aproape toți supraviețuiesc nu numai datorită ambiției proprii, ci mai ales acelor prieteni care îi caută și îi protejează. Totul se înlănțuie atât de armonios și totuși dureros, scriitorul reușind să dezvăluie strălucirile care străbat întunericul.

While this book starts well, it soon goes downhill.

The central character in the beginning is Marco Stanley Fogg. He drew my attention. What happens to him gives the reader a lot to think about. He is an orphan and has no relatives. He is totally alone, or so he thinks. Until..... Well, I am not going to tell you. And he is broke. When? 1969. Where? Brooklyn. I liked the writing. I liked the philosophical thoughts, his thoughts about writing, about travel, about how people interact and our need for connection with other human beings. All of this I found interesting! Then he meets Kitty. I liked her too.

However, the further you proceed the further the focus shifts from Marco to others and the weaker the story becomes. Mostly the book follows an elderly man, Effing. He is 84 in 1969. But who is Effing? First their stories are woven together, but then the Effing personality takes over. His story? Well it is crazy, as far as I am concerned. His story goes on and on, and on and on. It‘s too long, goes off on all different tangents, none of which were either credible or interesting. One example, to be specific, are the pages and pages and more pages about a book written by Effing’s son. Yes, there is a connection between Effing and Marco, but that connection is in no way credible. At least two thirds of the entire book left me totally unengaged. Little to think about. How is it possible to be engaged in a story that is beyond belief? In addition, this part of the book turns into a movie script.

The narration by Joe Barrett is absolutely excellent.

I enjoyed Timbuktu very much, but Moon Palace is unwieldy.

تستحق رواية قصر القمر الكثير من التقدير فى نسختها العربية بترجمتها الرائعة والسلسة.
وعن الرواية نفسها حدث ولا حرج: فالكاتب يتنقل بحرفية شديدة بين الاحداث بدون إزعاج أو ضوضاء إنتقال سلس ومرن بين صيغة المتكلم والمتكلم عنه/الراوى والمروى عنه فى ثلاث حكايات مختلفة ومترابطة الابن والجد والأب والأم فى جو مُلهم وجذاب يجعلك لا تنقل عينك عن الرواية لحين الانتهاء منها.
من أمتع الروايات التى قرأتها ومن أثقلها فلسفةً وعمقاً تغوص فى أعماق النفس البشرية وتقلباتها وإهتماماتها ونوازعها يُلقى الكاتب نظرة على تاريخ أمريكا منذ البدء بحروب الإبادة للسكان الأصليين وصراعات التقدم الحضارى كما فى صراع إديسون وتيسلا وحروب العصابات الباحثة عن المال والثراء فى القارة الناشئة.
نهاية الرواية عبقرية لماذا؟: كل هذه الصراعات التى لخص الكاتب نهايتها وزوالها وعدم وجود أى أثار لها بنهاية الرواية العبقرية بغرق الكهف تحت بحيرة كبيرة لتعلن نهاية عصر الصراعات وبداية عهد جديد من رأسمالية الرفاهة ومحو جزء كبير من تاريخ الولايات المتحدة لم يعد يتكلم عنه أحد..
شخصيات الرواية: سأتكلم فقط عن شخصيتين
1- الابن ماركو ستانلى فج هو شخصية الرواية المحورية وأهم أبطالها عرف منذ الصغر الفقد وعايشه (فقد الاب والام والخال والجد وأخيراً الحبيبة والطفل) فأصبح بالنسبة له بلا معنى. عاش الاستغناء ولم يبذل جهداً ليتغير بل ظل كما هو مستغنى عن المال الا ما يكفى الحاجة.
أضحت حبيبته جزء من حياته اعتاد على وجوده وكذلك خاله حتى أنه لم يحتفظ بما تبقى له من ذكرى خاله (مكتبة خاله والتى تجاوزت الالف كتاب) باعها ليطعم نفسه, إختصاراً لم يفعل فج شيئاً ليفيد نفسه لم يعمل لأجل العمل واستمرار الحياة بل كادت تكون حياته ثمناً للا مبالته وعدم اكتراثه.
2- الجد: يحتل الجد جزء مهم وكبير فى الرواية قدر ما لماضى الولايات المتحدة من أهمية وانعكاس فى حاضرنا فهو الماضى (ماضى الإبادة وصراعات التقدم المادى الحضارى وحروب العصابات (عصابات قُطاع الطرق و عصابات الاستحواذ على رؤس الأموال) ) الذى لا مفر منه الماضى الذى يشكل عقلية الحاضر وخطط المستقبل.

I did not expect this emotionally attached to M.S. but I did. By the end of the novel I was crying and cursing Auster for writing this. However obvious it may be that all the characters are only on paper, and were purposefully treated like they did, it did not stop me from feeling sorry. Starting from Effing, over the Kitty incident to the Sol's fate, I just hoped that M.S. would catch a break, but it obviously wasn't meant to be, and it is in their family to be unhappy and broken. I just noticed that that I have a tendency to get attached to broken characters, my poor babies like Steven Dedalus, Holden Caulfield, and now this one, not counting the ones from non canon lit :)

Ši Auster knyga - nuotykinė (na, savęs paieškų, santykių, žinoma, irgi). Prisiminiau, kaip apie indėnus ar Žiulio Verno knygas vaikystėje šlamščiau vieną po kitos. Įtraukė kaip reikiant, nuolat spėliojau, kas bus toliau, vaizduotėje jau pati kūriau tolesnius siužeto vingius. Bet, cha cha, Auster visus kartus mane apgavo, pasukdamas visai kita linkme. Už ką ir ačiū.

Free Will and Blind Luck

I find it very difficult to review a book I am so emotionally attached to. Even after a third read, I still feel so strongly that rational words struggle to reach the surface. I confessed this to GR friend, Violeta the other day. She is an Auster fan and wanted to read my thoughts on this one. Perhaps, a few personal touches and anecdotes will help get me from point A to B in this review.

Then I read an essay that explains how no scholar believes in free will anymore. Free Will is an illusion. Basically, our choices are predetermined by so many factors, neurology, the laws of physics, genes etc. Of course this upsets our sense of ourselves as agents of our destiny, perhaps we are more likely pushed into the choices we seem to think belong to us alone.

I pause while writing this to make my son dinner after he came home from coaching 12 year olds on our coldest wettest day so far. I am predetermined to do this even though I know he is 20 years old and capable of doing it himself. He of course is doing what I was doing for him 8 years ago, that is coaching a 12-year-old soccer team (his as it happens) and so it goes on.

This lead me to Moon Palace and the problem of chance. Chance events are the building blocks of the novel. Chance determines everything, but in a fatalistic way. Fogg, the narrator came from a family of immigrants whose name was changed on arrival at Ellis island from Fogelman. Fogg’s mother dies in an accident when he is nine. His uncle Victor adores him as the only family he has left. When he departs this world, he wills nephew Fogg with 1492 books, which he starts reading in a completely random way, box by box to honour his last family member, and stick to a predetermined path. This fatalism overwhelms Fogg and almost kills him since he gives himself over completely to chance and nearly starves to death. These elements would be spoilers if only the book was poorly written. But it is so beautifully done, you don’t care about the number of books corresponding to the year of Columbus’ discovery or any one of the many details that Fogg is clueless about his past. You stop caring about chance, time and destiny when you are in self-destructive mode. The past Fogg is about to encounter contains the big sprawling story of America – as big as the wild west and manifest destiny or the rise and fall of corporate empires. Chance encounters, experiences, events, signs and symbols act as the narrative glue in this story. How Auster pulls off the plausibility of the events is the spectacle. Fogg just happens to be in the middle of it all trying to see it all.

Personal anecdote spoiler: Books were randomly assigned to me as a child, since my parents could not read English. Even to poorly educated people like my parents, books still contained mystery and wonder. How did I come by books? My father worked in various jobs at a hospital. Books were left about in either the emergency department or outpatient appointment waiting room. Everyone knows to bring a book, or perhaps the nuns who originally ran this hospital believed it right to put books out for people to read, perhaps as a distraction from the anxiety of waiting for bad news. My father, perhaps realising his limitations as a reader and provider of educational support brought some of them home with him once in a while. So books randomly appeared at our home some mornings after one of my father’s night shifts. I got Gogol’s Dead Souls, David Copperfield, Vol 2, Anna Karenina Vol 1, War and Peace among many others like these as a twelve-year-old. Luck, chance, fathers. That’s what Moon Palace is all about. Lost fathers in novels are like lost fathers on night shifts.

Chance in an Auster novel is like a secret language of the universe. Without it, there is no meaning to the random elements of the lives of its characters. A bit like a novel, eh! I only read this book by chance too. I hung around in my 20s with a bunch of people who we’d now call geeks. These friends all loved Auster’s New York Trilogy. I didn’t. Perhaps it was the way they dissected it like a sci-fi movie hunt for George Lucas’ cultish hidden fanboy tributes that bothered me. Anyway, one day at a friend’s place I was bored and found Moon Palace on the shelf and started reading it. The friend said he didn’t like it and gave it to me. I lend it out often and it never seems to come back, requiring me to find a replacement copy every so often.

I like Auster’s take on America’s foundational myths, too. It’s full of stories of people setting off to find their destiny, down on luck, seeking truth, the Pacific Ocean, dramatic western vistas, enduring, surviving, left for dead, defying the odds. Only this time, the story involves one of the recent generation from a boatload of immigrants telling the story rather than some robber baron, plantation owning, corporate magnate with a string of newspapers.

Character isn’t Auster’s strong point. No one is deeply drawn. The old man Effing, who Fogg goes to work for is easily recognisable as any old rich easterner, cantankerous, moody, self-important mostly an a***hole. At times he seems to hold the destiny of young Fogg in his hands. Effing believes he is an agent of his own destiny, defying chance after a freak fall as he journeys across the continent seeking the aesthetic of the old west as a painter. Chance drives Effing’s own story, but he chooses to tell Fogg he has the mythical power of telekinesis. Old men of wealth will believe in their own power over life. This can only be a counterpoint to the element of chance, an irony of the passing of the old. Voice is a character in American fiction. I am convinced of it. So much so, that an American voiced character can only behave like an American. And Auster does something very interesting here, he reminds that this fast talking self-determining being is none other than a victim of chance, too. But you want to hear his story first. After all, even Odysseus was an a***hole at times.

By the end of it, each character in this book loses everyone they are close to. More like a melodrama than an earnest piece of literature. Fogg’s mother and uncle, eventually his father and even the grandfather he didn’t know about. He loses his lover Kitty Wu (three reads and I still will them to continue) and Zimmerman his old college buddy who saved his life when he went homeless. Loss is inevitable, like chance. The only point of loss is that it is a point along the way in a story that leads to another. Like a refutation of free will, there are elements at work leading from one point to the next that we cannot fully know until they are revealed.

I loved it. I loved reading this book, but I wish I hadn't read it so fast. I read it because of someone, and I can't thank him enough.

I put myself in M.S's shoes, and I cried, I laughed, I dreamt.

Paul has a poetic use of language, that's sure.

Primul meu Auster si simt ca am dat peste o comoara nebanuita...
O poveste duce la o alta, nu te astepti la nimic din ce urmeaza, personajele sunt fascinante (Thomas Effing va ramane pentru mine unul dintre cele mai reusite). Am simtit ceva din armosfera "Marilor sperante" a lui Dickens.
Mi-a placut cadenta frazelor, asa cum o iubesc la Saramago si Marias.
Iar felul in care scrie Auster este coplesitor, mi se pare perfect, inteligent, cursiv, acaparant.

"Odata ce ajungeam la capatul continentului, simteam ca am sa gasesc raspuns unei intrebari importante. Habar n-aveam despre ce intrebare e vorba, dar raspunsul se conturase deja in urma mea in timp ce mergeam, asa ca nu-mi ramanea decat sa continui sa merg ca sa aflu ca ma lasasem in urma, ca nu mai eram deloc cel de odinioara."