Moon Palace

ANNOTATION

Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg in Moon Palace Fogg goes through a period of time when he nearly starves himself to death out of poverty and dejection, is rescued by a beautiful Chinese girl named Kitty Wu, and ends up as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession and the focus of the novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction by award-winning novelist and poet Auster. Marco Fogg is a loner and a dreamer, whose ``mind is on the moon,'' and who in a state of elation unfolds moonlore to his friends. The year of the moon landing finds Fogg living in spartan reclusivity until forced from his New York apartment to roam as a Central Park vagrant. His rescue by Kitty Wu, a gentle Chinese girl, leads to their poignant and tenuous love. Like some of Auster's earlier protagonists, Fogg senses he has a kindred, submerged or vanished other self. Here, it is Fogg's father, who went into eclipse before his birth; the quest for the parent forms a narrative thread. When Fogg serves as reader/companion to the elderly cripple Barber, aka ``Effing,'' who recounts his adventures in a Western wilderness where he buried a cache of paintings, Fogg's fate takes an unexpected turn.

Library Journal - Grimm

The novel's fantastic quality can be hard to swallow, and some of the action is maddeningly distant, but it's interesting, worthwhile reading. -- Library Journal

Allon Reich

Moon Palace is a richly textured fairy tale which is his most sustained and powerful work to date. . . . The story is told in regulated, measured prose, sufficiently flexible to accommodate, at certain moments, an emotional intensity which Auster has not achieved in his fiction before. . . . [The book] becomes a semi-nostalgic epitaph for the lost innocence of the 1960s American dream, when a young man could still get west, chastened by his voyage through the vast empty wilderness, and declare that 'this is where my life begins'. -- The New Statesman

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