The Avid Reader: "There are no coincidences. That word is used only by ignorant people."

I made a bold claim last post. I said I thought As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann was my favorite read of the summer--but I hadn't yet read Paul Auster's Moon Palace. After finishing the short book, 300 pages long, I was unable to get rid of a faint smile on my face.

Moon Palace is about identity, about discovering the past (or the past discovering you), about love, and about serendipity. It is narrated by Marco Fogg whose voice is intensely singular -- lyrical and reminiscent and sure. The novel is suffused with a positivity throughout, even though it is full of bleak events and rock-bottoms, for it is essentially a flashback and thus has a better end in sight. M.S., as Fogg is mostly called, is studying at Colombia University, having separating ways with a beloved Uncle who raised Fogg after his mother's death. Fogg was only eleven and left orphaned, his father having been a blank identity all his life, but the blow, though very hard on our narrator, was lessened by the connection he found with his uncle. A deep and lasting influence to Fogg, his Uncle Victor was full of life and love for his nephew. Nearing the end of his studies at college, Fogg experiences another crisis when he finds himself suddenly with no family--his uncle has died. This is when the plot really begins. Facing such hurt and defeat, Fogg, seeing no course of action that could adequately deal with his loss, chooses to do absolutely nothing, relying on whatever money he has to last until graduation. He ends up homeless, gaunt from subsisting solely on eggs, and haunting Central Park. It is only when two friends find and save a near-to-death M.S. that he manages to get his life back on track. He acquires a job, that of being a reader to a cantankerous trickster of an old man named Thomas Effing. By Fogg's own admission, it was nothing but chance that got him this job, but it led him down a path full of many other tricks of fate. The novel really requires suspension of disbelief in this matter, for the events and character connections are indeed fantastic and far-fetched, but it allows for a beautiful story. Plus, chance is given such a heavy role in The Moon Palace, it is not so much a necessary contrivance as an integral part of the story.

I really enjoyed that Moon Palace was sentimental, and not in a gushy, cheesy way. I mean more that it celebrates the ties that connect us to others and to the world around us in a way that very much appeals to the emotional center of the reader. Fogg recalls moments of intense sadness, such as when he visited his mother and uncle's grave site, as well as of intense joy and love for his Uncle or his serious girlfriend, Kitty. It is wonderful to get into such a character's head; even when facing dangerously low morale Fogg keeps up optimism, has faith in workings of the world, and never forgets his family.

Moon Palace is at once particular and general, able to give beautiful, concise synopses of periods of time, while also offering precise images of actual moments, and transitioning beautifully in-between. He might introduce an event or chronicle a change of situations, then with a broad statement make it seem as if the topic was closed, only to go back into detail.

Throughout Auster's novel, there was a consistent accompaniment of identity with the donning of clothes. When M.S. goes to Colombia, he begins to obsessively wear Victor's coat in an effort to be connected and protected, calling it a "second skin."

"If I could not write often, I nevertheless managed to stay in spiritual contact with him by wearing the suit. Suits were hardly in fashion of undergraduates back then, but I felt at home in it, and since for all practical purposes I had no other home, I contented to wear it every day, from the beginning of the year to the end. At moments of stress and unhappiness, it was a particular comfort to feel myself swaddled in the warmth of my uncle's clothes, and there were times when I imagined the suit as actually holding me together, that if I did not wear it my body would fly apart. It functioned as a protective membrane a second skin that shielded me from the blows of life."

Later, soon after beginning to work for Effing, M.S. inherits the jacket of his predecessor and overtly discusses how, in wearing the jacket, their identities were converging:

"I found it eerie to walk around in it, knowing that it had belonged to a man who was now dead, but I continued to wear it on all our outings for the rest of the winter. To assuage my compunctions, I tried to think of it as a kind of uniform that went with the job but that didn't do much good. Whenever I put it on, I couldn't help feeling that I was stepping into a dead man's body, that I had been turned into Pavel Shum's ghost."

Even more explicit is Effing's actual identity change. When he was younger, Thomas ventured into the Utah deserts to paint, but his journey ended in disaster when his traveling companion met an ugly death. Effing finds a hermit's cave, whose owner, serendipitously, had recently been murdered, thus freeing up his fully stocked abode. Thomas decides it a wonderful opportunity to leave his family, life, and career behind him. He disrobes the hermit and takes the clothes for his own, simultaneously taking and replacing the identity of the dead and unknown hermit.

"There would be nothing to prevent him from taking the hermit's place, Effing thought. They were more or less the same age, they were more or less the same size, they both had the same light brown hair. It would not be very difficult to grow a beard and start wearing the dead man's clothes. He would take on the hermit's life and continue to live it for him, acting as though the soul o this man had now passed into his possession."

I very much enjoyed this book!! I recommend it to anyone and everyone! I still haven't posted about a few books, but I'm already starting my next one: Ancient Light, by John Banville. I've read his novel The Infinities and I really loved it so am looking forward to another Banville book. I have heard mixed things about him and his writing, though.
*Update: I didn't like this book very much, even at 40% in. I think I'm done giving it chances. I did not like what the narrator, I did not necessarily like the writing, the plot was extremely boring and a random mix that focused on women. Not a pretty picture of women, either. His wife, elderly, very kind, but full of grief at their dead daughter, is essentially made a fool of as the narrator reminisces about his one time affair with his best friend's mother. She, Mrs. Gray, is a loose woman of thirty-something who is okay having relations with her son's best friend, while married? And her character is flat, flat, flat. The narrator even talks about women as "mine," admitting he thinks this about every women he's been in some kind of relationship with. I'll pass on that book, when there's nothing to keep me there!

Except for The English Patient, which is waiting patiently for me, I have read the big bunch of books I bought! Here are the books I've been interested in lately, some which I have already bought:

1. English Patient, Michael Oondaatje
2. The Golden Palace, Yukio Mishima
3. Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima
4. The Sea, John Banville
5. The Orchardist, Amanda Coplin
6. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
7. The Trial, Franz Kafka
8. Any Saul Bellow book
9. The Cuckoo's Calling, Robert Galbraith
10. Disgrace, Coetzee

And finally, some pictures!