"It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. "

The overriding theme of this novel is redemption. Can someone who has sunk so low as that they have eat other peoples' discarded food ever make a life for themselves.

Marco Stanley Fogg is a child of the sixties, and has had a tough start in life, no known father and a mother who was killed by a bus when he was a young boy, brought up by an uncle who lived a hand to mouth existence as a musician. This novel covers the early years in Fogg's life, a life steeped in tragedy and loss. Beginning during 'the summer that men first walked on the moon', and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations propelled by coincidence and memory.

In fact Auster rather than trying to shy away from coincidences makes a feature of them, deliberately stretching the reader's credulity to the limit. The book centres around three characters, who through accidents of birth are blood relatives and yet no one knows about it until its far too late.

Fogg is a dreamer drifting through life, directionless with no ambitions and unable to properly manage his money. I really liked how Fogg uses his uncles boxes of books as furniture when he first moves to Manhattan and as he reads the books so his furniture slowly disappears, " each time I opened another box, I simultaneously destroyed another piece of furniture. My bed was dismantled, my chairs shrank and disappeared, my desk atrophied into empty space. My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness. Each time I ventured into my uncle’s past, it produced a physical result, an effect in the real world. The consequences were therefore always before my eyes, and there was no way to escape them.”

Moon Palace is such a great mix of sadness and humour. There were a lot of witty and sardonic sections, everything about this book is such a mix of contradictions and my mood swung along with it. Overall I found it a witty novel, filled with many unexpected coincidences that is also remarkably easy to read. ( )

One of my favourite books. I love the main character with his unique upbringing. The story reads fast yet is philosophical. The old guy and the whole story about the cabe in the dessert was hilarious. And then there are even more turns to this story. ( )

Marco Stanley Fogg (por Marco Polo, por el Stanley que encontró a Livingstone y por el Phileas Fogg de La vuelta al mundo en ochenta días) está a las puertas de la edad adulta cuando los astronautas ponen el pie en la Luna. Hijo de padre desconocido, muerta su madre cuando él tenía once años, Marco Stanley fue educado por su tío Víctor, un excéntrico que se ganaba la vida tocando el clarinete en orquestas de mala muerte. Ahora, en el comienzo de la era lunar, muerto su tío, Marco Stanley Fogg solo tiene dinero para sobrevivir unos pocos meses más. Gradualmente, pero sin pausa, va cayendo en la indigencia, la soledad y una suerte de tranquila locura de matices dostoievskianos, donde su vida se reduce a explorar los gozosos infiernos del despojamiento absoluto. Vive ya como un animal en una cueva de Central Park, en un semidelirio provocado por el hambre, cuando la bella Kitty Wu lo rescata. Fogg se salva y decide, por primera vez en su vida, buscar un trabajo. El destino, y una compleja red de significantes en torno a la luna, lo lunar y la luz, le llevan a trabajar como lector y acompañante de Thomas Effing, un viejo pintor paralítico. Y escribiendo la biografía de Effing, que este quiere legar a Solomon Barber, el hijo al que nunca conoció, Marco Stanley Fogg descubrirá, en un viaje que le lleva desde el Palacio de la Luna, un restaurante chino de Nueva York, a los lunares paisajes del Oeste americano, los misterios de su propio origen, el nombre y la identidad de su padre.

9788447360864

9788447360864