What a drag it is getting old. Those who shape our lives leave us forever, departing to another country that we too one day will emigrate to. As Kurt Vonnegut said in his gnomic way “so it goes”. So it goes.
Earlier this year, one such person departed from my life, someone I had never met, but whose passing I was made aware of not through the news media, but by people close to me messaging me, to let me know that Paul Auster was dead.
Paul Auster’s untimely passing
Paul Auster’s death, at 77, wasn’t untimely – lung cancer eventually taking the man who wrote the screenplays for the films “Smoke” and “Blue in the Face” that celebrated smoking, and who in earlier years was rarely photographed without a cigarette. Regardless, I felt shocked and saddened upon finding out his time had come; simply because his book, “Moon Palace”, had changed my life.
“This book will change your life” is embellished, in various phrasings, on many tomes, mostly dealing with self-help, peddled by apparently philanthropic souls who wish to share their roadmap to Nirvana – for a price. “Moon Palace” came with no such promises. It was the third novel Auster had written, was published in 1989 and I read it around 3 years later, lent to me by one of those who had contacted me when the author died.
The day after it came into my possession, I was monitoring the recording of an exceptionally boring day of corporate-speak at some anonymous venue in London, so – save for turning the cassettes over every 45 minutes – had nothing to do and no phone, back then, to play on so I read; read the whole book in one sitting. Somehow, in some indefinable way, I was not quite the same person afterwards.
What makes this so far mundane occurrence slightly more interesting, is that, unknown to any of us, my brother and sister were, around the same time, reading this novel, and became similarly captivated. Only several years later – we grew up in, and live in, different countries – did we discover this. It was the kind of serendipity that Auster himself loved. In 2001, he compiled “True Tales of American Life”, a book stuffed with improbable tales of far-fetched coincidences that had been submitted to him from listeners to an American radio station.
Moon Palace and serendipity
“Moon Palace”, when summarised, is essentially about not knowing one’s father, which is why it appealed to myself and my siblings – but that’s another story. As a result, I cannot promise you, dear reader, that it will have the same effect on you as it did on me (and in many ways, I hope that it doesn’t) but if you haven’t read any Auster, it’s as good a place to start as any.
Paul Auster wrote well. Although contemporaneous with the UK literary cabal of Amis fils, McEwan, Barnes, Rushdie and Ishiguro, in the USA he cut a solitary figure. He was too old to be considered alongside Roth, Bellow and Updike and too young to join Tartt, Easton Ellis and McInerney, and was better-known in Europe than on his own soil. Being described as a “postmodernist” writer irritated him. His fiction describes the fantastically improbable – albeit still plausible – rather than invoking the flights of literal fantasy contained within magic realism. He wrote well, stories unfold, tales are told, and although they can frequently veer from the present to the past, the reader is never left unsure of where they are in the narrative. As the critic James Wood wrote:
One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent eruptions, have what The Times once called ‘all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller’.
For someone whose first “proper” novel – “The New York Trilogy”, probably his best-known work – didn’t come out until he was 40, and who took a break from writing fiction in the late 90s to focus on writing and directing films, Auster has left us with a respectable body of work: some 16 novels, the last of which was only published last year. As well as “Moon Palace” – a book I have bought many times now to give away to others – I would recommend its successor, “The Music of Chance”, the only novel of Auster’s to be filmed.
The power of chance in his work
As I’ve written, Auster was obsessed with the random nature of existence, a concept that was central to one of his last works: “4 3 2 1”. As a teenager, attending a summer camp, a bolt of lightning killed a boy literally inches away from him, an event which gave him, at a very early age, an unforgettable illustration of how fragile our existence is. He once said:
I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it. I think it was the most important day of my life.
And a similar incident occurs in the book, which shows how chance affects the same life in four different ways.
Final reflection: submit to fate
I too consider the random element of how my friend singled out “Moon Palace” to lend to me; how I had the rare luxury of uninterrupted time in which to devour it; how that act of literary gluttony meant that the words solidified inside me in a way no other book ever has, and how that one book above all others unites me to my siblings. Perhaps chance has led you to this very page; if so I urge you to click on the link, download it or order it, and create an oasis of time in which to read it. Submit to fate.
You can buy Paul Auster’s “Moon Palace” in eBook format from Amazon via this link, or even better, order it from your local bookstore.
